


White

by scarrletmoon



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Drug Use, F/M, Het and Slash, M/M, References to Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-19
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-11-19 01:26:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 25
Words: 30,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/567475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarrletmoon/pseuds/scarrletmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the first incident, Sherlock is given a warning. On the second, he sees a therapist. John realizes his unique case, but fails to see its pitfall until it's too late.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Silence

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Dove Keeper](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/13729) by underwater_sky. 



> So this was partially inspired by an RP I did ages ago, and The Dove Keeper (mostly for the whole age difference thing). I never thought I'd actually get around to writing it, but I DID, so that's awesome. I'm pretty proud of this one. 
> 
> Big thanks to panicsatdiscos on Tumblr for beta-ing for me. 
> 
> Hopefully, this goes as well as I want it to.

The boy stared right back at John with a certain coldness that the man thought he was used to by now. There was an edge to this, a deep iciness that came with solitude, and John only hoped that he could fix it. He’d stopped deluding himself into thinking he could save absolutely everyone a long time ago.  


John looked the boy over - dark, curled hair and gray eyes, with a confident hand on the armrest of the sofa - before he opened his mouth to initiate conversation. The boy stopped him.  


“Don’t ask me to introduce myself,” he said stiffly. His voice was deeper than John had been expecting. “You have my files.”  


“You don’t think there’s anything to add?” John asked.  


The boy met his gaze evenly. John could see it being intimidating - he’d met others who had those same dark glares, kids who’d gotten into fights and hurt people, hurt themselves. But there was an air to this, and an intelligent scrutiny that John had never really felt before. The boy had a look that was intimidating in a way that made John feel inadequate and stupid. It was strange.  


“There’s nothing I want to add,” he muttered. “It’s unnecessary.”  


John sat back and clasped his hands over his clipboard. He always took notes - he needed them to keep track of all of his clients - but this was different. This was like that first case somehow, although John didn’t realize this until it was too late.  


“You think this session is unnecessary or you are unnecessary?” he asked.  


The boy’s gaze did not waver. For a long time, they stared at each other in silence, calculating, evaluating, judging. He never answered the question.  


“You’re sacrificing a lot of things for her.”

John frowned. “What?”  


But the boy’s eyes passed right over John’s face and scanned his desk. “You care about her, so you’re going to keep pretending that you like it here.” His eyes returned to John’s, but it was as if he was looking through the doctor, rather than at him. “You don’t know if you’ve made the right choice and it terrifies you.”  


Silence. Then, “How did you know all that?”  


The boy looked away again, and when he spoke, his voice was so much smaller, so much less confident and almost ashamed. It was almost afraid.  


“I didn’t know,” Sherlock said, “I saw.”


	2. Beginnings

“You’re wondering how I did it.”  
  
John looked up from the notes he’d been taking- the only ones he’d ever really take, before and after their sessions. John twiddled his pen between his fingers. “Sorry?”  
  
Sherlock leaned his head against his hand, his fingers brushing thoughtfully against his lips. “How I knew you didn’t like it here.”  
  
John sat back and raised his eyebrows in a way to encourage Sherlock to continue.  
  
“The picture on your desk,” he said, and John turned to look at the picture of Mary tottering on a stack of books. “And your organization.”  
  
“My organization?”  
  
“Haphazard. Unusual, since you’re a tidy person. The things you’ve left on your desk aren’t in their right place but aren’t a complete disaster. So you haven’t quite settled, but it’s been a while since you’ve set up a practice with a few other counselors and established yourself here. You haven’t completely moved everything in, because you can’t stand to. You keep meaning to, but until this place starts to feel less alien, it’s not going to change.“ Sherlock paused and scanned the desk again. “You miss London too much.”  
  
John felt a little jolt somehow near his stomach that felt strangely cold. Now that he’d heard it, it seemed obvious. How had he thought that he could hide it from everyone, let alone Mary? It was terrifying to think that maybe his whole life was laid out in just his clothes, but it was a thrilling sort of terror, one that he strangely wanted more of.  
  
“How did you see all of that?” he asked, moving his notebook back to the desk where it would stay for the next few sessions.  
  
It was only their third hour together, but Sherlock’s hesitations were shorter now. “I can...deduce things. Mycroft can do it better, of course, but some things...they leave imprints, signs on your body or your clothes. Stray animal hairs on your trouser legs, the way you organize things or hold something - it can explain a lot about your personality, about where you’ve been in the last few hours. I’ve been trying to...refine it.”  
  
John, of course, was amazed. “Most kids your age are out trying to figure out how to get drunk without their parents noticing. For a start.”  
  
“I’m not most kids,” Sherlock pointed out.  
  
John smiled. “No. You’re really not.”  
  
He might’ve imagined it, but he thought he saw Sherlock’s lips twitch infinitesimally at that.


	3. Silver

There was a day between the first session and the next, and John spent that day thinking about Sherlock. He was the first thing John wanted to tell Mary about when he got home, but he couldn’t. He could never directly talk about his clients unless they were a danger to themselves or others, no matter how much it pained him to stay silent. But she still noticed this time when he came home, looked at him in the middle of dinner and smiled.  


“What?” he'd asked, his fork halfway to his mouth.  


“Nothing,” she'd said, leaning her head on her hand thoughtfully. “You just seem happy.”  


John only noticed his own smile when he looked down at his food shyly. “I might be.”  


“It’s the happiest I’ve seen you since we moved here,” she added softly, and John felt guilty. He hadn’t meant to let on. He hadn’t thought it was obvious.  


He reached out across the table and took her hand in his, thumb brushing across her knuckles soothingly. “I couldn’t let you leave me behind, could I?” He smiled, and the worried crease between her eyebrows faded and relaxed.  


He still felt guilty.  


It bothered him for hours until the next day when he saw Sherlock again. Out of all the people he saw on a daily basis - the recovering addict, the depressed office worker, the girl with the scars on her wrists and the boy with the eating disorder - Sherlock was the one he was most interested in. This obviously wasn’t fair to John’s other clients, and the fact sat uncomfortably with him, but he couldn’t help it. He was curious.  


Sherlock had a bruise over his left eye when he settled into the chair opposite John’s. Neither of them mentioned it.  


“How old are you, Sherlock?” John asked first, once the boy had settled into his corner on the sofa.  


Sherlock stared pointedly at the notebook John had deliberately left on the desk beside him, before answering. His voice was wary; suspicious. “Sixteen.”  


John nodded thoughtfully. “Any siblings?”  


Sherlock was obviously trying to calculate John’s motives, and he had a hard time keeping the smile off his face as he watched Sherlock become steadily more and more guarded.  “A brother. Mycroft.”  


“Do you get along?”  


Sherlock pursed his lips. “We used to.”  


John raised his eyebrows for him to continue.  


Sherlock hesitated, looked down at his hands and then up again. “Something happened.”  


“What happened?” John coaxed. Now would be when he’d look up from his notes with the concerned expression that so many assumed was faked- because therapy, to the general public, was just a ploy to get money. Therapy was for the severely depressed and the lunatics who couldn’t even be arrested for their insanity. This would be when John would wait for the story that had brought his client here, for the words that he would write down and eventually file away and  never really forget. But this was different. This was something more than the notes, John thought.

“What happened that stopped you from getting along?”

Sherlock’s expression was grim. There was a sort of sadness held behind his eyes, behind the brave face he put on as he soldiered through his life because it wasn’t as if there was anyone he could talk to or depend on if something like this happened.  
“His loyalty,” Sherlock said eventually, and John noticed how he twisted his fingers together on his lap. Sherlock’s  voice was bitter. "To Mycroft, pride comes before family."


	4. Choices

“When did they start? The...deductions, I mean?”  
  
This time, John noticed, Sherlock’s eyes were clearer, more hopeful and less cold. He looked like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep too, like the last few days had been just a little easier to get through.  
  
"I was three or four, I think," he said, after some contemplation. "The first..." He pulled his legs up under his chin. "...was my father's affair."  
  
Their eyes met then, and for the next half hour, Sherlock spoke for longer than he had ever really intended to.  
  
He could still remember, he said, the strained look on his mother’s face when he had asked why father was never home,  and why his jackets always smelled of smoke and another lady’s perfume when he was. He could remember the tight line of her mouth and the sharp tone she’d used when she’d told him to stop prying.  
  
“She had lovers of her own eventually, ” Sherlock murmured, his eyes distant. “Men who came and went within weeks or days. They used each other, my parents and their lovers. I only ever saw the men leave when I came home, but it was enough...the airline pilot and the bartender...the adulterer and the desperate bachelor with a failing career...” He looked up and and focused his eyes on John’s face. The man knew what Sherlock  was looking for: pity. Sherlock wouldn’t find it there. John didn’t pity him.   
  
“Did anyone find out?” John asked as Sherlock searched his face. “About the affairs, the state of your parents marriage?”  
  
“No.” He pursed his lips. “If there’s one thing the Holmes are good at, it’s hiding things.”  
  
They were both silent again, but it was a peaceful sort of silence, the kind of quiet that came easily with close friends - almost like his and Mary’s silences, John thought, although there was something to this that he couldn’t quite place. He and Sherlock seemed to fall into step with each other in a way John had never felt before, and it was odd.  
  
Dangerous, he thought briefly, before Sherlock continued.  
  
“My parents stayed together for the sake of keeping up appearances,” Sherlock said, and John could hear the disdain clearly in his voice. “I think they enjoyed the comfort too much to separate. They both had lovers and money and a house that people would have killed for.” Sherlock sniffed. “Who cared about the children?  
  
“And Mycroft...when he was old enough, he disappeared. Took the car and left for days, came back and found the house as he’d left it, with another man lounging in the living room in a dressing gown and our mother nowhere to be found. I just tried to leave the house as much as possible.”  
  
“Where did you go?” John’s voice was even quieter than Sherlock’s - Sherlock, who had mostly spoken in a soft murmur, as if the entire world would hear anything louder.  
  
Sherlock shrugged a shoulder and pulled his knees in even further. “Out. Down the street, to the park, into town...” He trailed off and curled in on himself a little more without really meaning to. There was something there, hidden in the hunch of his shoulders and the tense crease between his eyebrows, in the way he absentmindedly scratched at his fingers and in the anxious twitch of his lips, something he’d never told anyone until now.   
  
“After a while, when I was...” He stopped suddenly, took in a deep breath and was suddenly more animated, intense and focused. “I felt hopeless. I was...there was this period of stasis where I was expected to keep walking, to keep putting one foot in front of the other and for what? It’s worse than wanting to die, it’s like watching everything you know pulled out from under you but not knowing how to get it back.” With his arms pulled tight over his knees and his eyes troubled, he looked at John.  
  
“At least when I wanted to die, I had a purpose.”


	5. Transparent

It wasn’t that he was depressed, Sherlock tried to explain, at least not at first. He never bothered to research it, and he was loathe to self diagnosis. He simply hated being alive, even back when his thoughts were becoming a slightly louder hum than he was used to. When he thought about it logically, it made sense; dying meant not having to watch his parents burn themselves out, not having to watch himself struggle through school and a friendless life for another year or so until uni rolled around. There was less stress, he thought, less responsibility. And if he killed himself, he speculated, who would really miss him?  
  
With every glance in his direction, John could tell Sherlock was glad he didn’t interject with the usual claim that people would miss him. It was about as useful to Sherlock as telling him to clap his hands and slap a smile on his face. This  was more than the adolescent phase of moodiness: this was the seemingly endless pit of darkness that loomed behind every waking thought, that crouched on his shoulders and waited for the moment of weakness that would let it take over. And it didn’t take much, Sherlock admitted, for him to finally break down and give in. It was right there, it was always right there, and all he’d really needed to do was steal money from his perpetually drunk father in order to get it. A few more taunts at school, another disgusted glare from his father, another condescending adult and he was gone. He got his fix when the house was empty, in a secluded corner of town with others unwillingly hanging onto life, with the person who offered him that first sacred line of powder that started everything.  
  
Sherlock leaned his head back against the sofa, and his eyelids flickered as he remembered. “It was overwhelming,” he murmured as his fingers dug into the fabric of the couch. “Bright and sharp like...glass shards and razor blades and needles.” His voice became softer, more frantic and harder to understand. “It was terrifying and I hated myself for being afraid, and she laughed...she was already high when she offered it to me, and she nearly hit her head on the sink because my reaction to it was so funny to her.” He stopped. His breathing was calm, but his eyes moved restlessly from one point on the ceiling to the other.  
  
“And then eventually,” Sherlock muttered as his knuckles began to turn white, “eventually it was something... something I realized that I needed. With the energy that I felt...nothing mattered anymore, suddenly. Suddenly everything was....it didn’t....I didn’t care.” He tilted his head forwards again and met John’s eyes, his expression frustrated. Sherlock didn’t like not being able to put what he felt into words. He hated it. But John said nothing and listened, and Sherlock went on.  
  
“It was beautiful,” he whispered, looking past John and back into his own head. “I didn’t care and I didn’t think and I’d never felt anything like that before. My whole life has just been...been thoughts and details and....” He ran an agitated hand through his hair, and his curls looked almost alarmed where his fingers disturbed them. “I loved it. I loved not feeling anything other than this euphoria and superiority and strength that made my thoughts less overwhelming  and I couldn’t bring myself to stop.”  
  
Sherlock paused for a longer time than he had before. He slowly came back to himself and on noticing his position - one leg curled up to his chest and the other on the floor - he put his chin on his knee and stared at John with every question he knew the man couldn’t answer.  
  
“I didn’t see the point of dying anymore,” he said softly. “And I hated them for taking that from me.” **  
**


	6. Run

The next day, Sherlock stood in the doorway of John’s office, stared straight ahead and swallowed hard.  
  
“I don’t want to be in here,” he said.  
  
They took a walk.  
  
Behind the building was the local park. For the first five minutes or so that they were together, Sherlock said nothing. He hunched his shoulders against the wind and scuffed his shoes as he walked,  and John was reminded suddenly that Sherlock was still a child - sixteen, yes, but still a vulnerable despite his intelligence and the cold exterior he put on to keep people away.  
  
It was early enough in the day that there weren’t that many people around. Their slow walk through the park was mostly littered with weary mothers with children too young to cause real uproar, and the occasional group of skiving teenagers; now was around the time when they started crawling out of their holes with their packs of borrowed cigarettes after a hard day of avoiding authorities that might have been looking for them. Sherlock spared them a brief glare of disdain before he returned to looking as stormy and agitated as he had when he had stood in the doorway earlier. He looked like he couldn’t stand his own skin.  
  
“What happened?” John asked finally, after Sherlock aimed a particularly frustrated kick at a rock and sent it skidding a few meters ahead.  
  
“Everything,” Sherlock answered bitterly, pushing his shaking hands deeper into his sweatshirt pockets. He kept walking for at least another minute before he stopped suddenly, visibly wavered and then blurted, “This was a bad idea. Let’s go back.”  
  
John didn’t protest. Sherlock ran on ahead.  
  
This didn’t happen - or, it did, John reminded himself, just not like this. John had seen grown men like this, seen them curl, defeated and rocking, with their knees pulled up to their chests. John had seen it and consoled them and they had cried but John had always been impossibly glad that he had been able to help them. He’d realized, after the first time he had helped Harry bandage her hands after a fight, after he had stayed and let her cry on his shoulder for hours, that he had to help people. He wanted to, he supposed, but there was always that need to help people, to stop someone suffering if he could that he couldn’t fight against if he tried.  
  
But this time the feeling was wrong. There was the same impulse to help, but it had somehow shifted into something else, something that hurt. Watching Sherlock’s hunched figure stirred something in him that he could remember feeling before. It wasn’t the gravitational pull of suffering, it was...compassion. But no, that wasn’t it, was it?  After John found him curled on the sofa, the man barely hesitated before he sat down beside the boy and put an arm around his shoulders. Sherlock never protested. He relaxed against John’s side as easily as if this had never been new to them, and John carded his fingers through the boy’s hair.  
  
“I wish....” Sherlock whispered.  
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“I wish I could just stop _thinking_. Every detail I see, every piece of self-criticism and loathing, I wish it could stop but it never will and it...it terrifies me.” Sherlock twisted a little to meet John’s gaze, and the man hoped more than anything that one day he’d be able to see the fear and the hurt and the confusion fade out of those eyes.  
  
It was then, perhaps, that it became too late.


	7. Progression

“What happened when your dad found out?” John asked.   
  
They were on the floor that day, lying side by side on their backs and watching the rain cast shadows on the wall opposite the window. John was still wondering how he’d let himself get dragged to the floor- the room was big enough for it and he had to admit that he had found the soft rug in the middle of the room inviting, but it wasn’t as if he had the time or an excuse to lie down on it. But Sherlock had insisted.   
  
“The first time,” Sherlock began, leaning back on his crossed arms behind his head, “I was careless. I’ll admit I really did go too far. This is the deal I made with Father, to go through therapy rather than...rehab. He really didn’t want a huge scandal but he doesn’t believe that any of this is a real...problem. There’re people who have so much less than me. I’ll admit I’d gotten to a point where I couldn’t remember the last time I was completely sober, but to my father my actions were unnecessary.”  
  
“Did you think you needed them? The drugs?”  
  
They listened to the sound of the rain for a while, to the calm haze and the steady drum against the roof. They listened to every car that  drove past, to the wet sound of tires as they grew and faded; to the occasional hurried tap of footsteps; to every slight movement the other made; to the imagined heartbeats of the person beside them that were too soft to really hear.  
  
“If they stopped me from tearing myself apart,” Sherlock murmured, “then I think they were...everything.”  
  
“Do you still think so?”  
  
He hesitated. “I don’t know.”   
  
“I just didn’t want to have to come back to myself,” he continued, “To the...noise.”   
  
“You said Mycroft is the same? How does he cope?”   
  
“I don’t know.” He sounded so lost that John was tempted to pull him into a hug again, but he knew he couldn’t. John had promised himself that that had been something he couldn’t repeat, and he couldn’t let it get out of control. Once was enough. “Considering we hardly talk now, I doubt I could ask him.”  
  
Sherlock sighed. “The first time dad found me, I’d given up trying to hide it. I didn’t think he’d care when he’d never shown any sign of caring before. I’d switched to hash. It was easier to get, less expensive and not nearly as good, but it was good enough.  When he finally noticed, he took one look at me and...blew up.”   
  
John winced. “And then?”  
  
“Then he took everything. The drugs, my money, my phone, my computer...I wasn’t exactly in the position to really fight back at the time since I was still...but after a few hours the drugs wore off and I....woke up.”  
  
Sherlock’s words hung in the silence for a while as the rain continued outside. Sherlock was still staring vacantly at the ceiling when John spoke again. “Did he send you-”  
  
“He didn’t want anyone to know. He was ashamed of me, he always has been. So he kept me in the house, had my schoolwork sent to me at home, sent someone to look after me and try to get me to talk. He kept me there until I could function again. “  
  
“How long?”  
  
“Two weeks to be able to think straight. Another one was spent planning my suicide. Eventually I threw myself back into work because it turned out that was the only thing that barely kept everything under control. Puzzles keep my mind occupied. The harder they are, the less I have to depend on...other things.”   
  
Sherlock’s breathing was calm, set to the same natural pace as the uneven, soporific beat of the rain. John sometimes wondered what made rain peaceful in the first place. It was only water after all.   
  
“I’m glad I listened to him,” Sherlock said softly.   
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“I’m glad I came here.”   
  
When their eyes met again,  John felt a sudden tension in his chest, as if his ribs had gotten tangled in a string were being pulled through his skin, as if a weight had been dropped on his chest at the same time. It hurt to hold Sherlock’s gaze and do nothing (although John wasn’t entirely sure what he would do if he ignored the pressure pushing down on his lungs) but he resisted. He knew Sherlock could feel it because his expression changed from peaceful to strained in the space of a minute, and the room was suddenly too hot, and the air was slightly harder to breathe than it had been seconds before.   
  
Sherlock swallowed. It was quiet enough in the room that John heard it too, and every muscle in his body locked for a full second before he calmed himself down. It was nothing, John reminded himself sternly, it wasn’t going to turn into anything. He didn’t want a repeat of Alice. No one wanted that.   
  
But it was so obvious in Sherlock’s eyes, and as John watched the boy moved a hand from the back of his head and moved downwards, searching for John’s hand yet never breaking eye contact. John felt the heat of Sherlock’s hand first, and then the tentative brush of his fingertips-  
  
There was a knock on the door and they both jumped.  
  
Sarah.   
  
“Sorry, I was just checking,” she said when John answered the door,, smiling apologetically, but also curiously glancing over his shoulder.. “It’s just that it’s ten minutes over now.”   
  
John startled a little. “Oh. Right.” He looked back at Sherlock, was just standing up and picking up his schoolbag from the floor beside the couch and deliberately avoiding looking at anyone.. “Sorry.”  
  
“It’s fine,” Sarah assured him. It was still there all over her face though, and John wondered if Sherlock could see it too: the doubt and concern and disheartening relief that had been there all those years ago when it seemed like everyone would be talking about _that_ incident until he died.   
  
Sherlock did glance at the man before he left, and John wondered when he’d hear about that deduction next.   
  
He wasn’t looking forward to it.


	8. Conflict

“John,” Mary asked later that day, “is there...something you want to tell me?”  
  
John looked up from his book to frown at her and he watched as her fingers nervously trailed along the edge of her book. She wasn’t looking at him, and it felt strange to see her so tense. He marked his page and set the book aside to give her his full attention. It was getting late, but he didn’t care; they didn’t see a lot of each other during the week what with Mary’s often irregular hours and it was almost rare nowadays for them to go to bed at the same time like this. And every time he got back after seeing Sherlock, he always felt strangely guilty. John only spent an hour with the boy; hiis relationship with his client and the one with Mary were two completely different things.   
  
Completely different.   
  
“What do you mean?”   
  
“I mean...” Her fingers stopped halfway down the the edge of the cover. “Never mind. It’s nothing. I’m just-”  
  
“No, tell me,” John insisted, closing his book and putting his hand over hers. She still avoided his eyes.   
  
“It’s probably nothing,” she said, turning over their hands and tracing the lines in John’s palm with her thumb. “It’s not that I don’t want you to be happy, I just thought....and I got talking to Fiona and I....but it’s nothing, isn’t it?” Her eyes were so hopeful when she looked up, yet simultaneously guilty; they trusted each other absolutely, and this tiny seed of doubt was terrifying. John wanted to tell her that she was imagining things, that everything was exactly the same as it had been just a month ago, before the boy with his deductions and this move to a small town that he still didn’t feel comfortable in.. “You’re not...seeing someone, are you?”   
  
The guilt sat strong and dirty in the pit of his stomach but he kept his expression calm.. Mary didn’t need to know. It was nothing. He was in control of this, he knew he was.   
  
“Of course I’m not,” he assured her, covering her hand with his. “I wouldn’t do that to you.” He felt, suddenly, like he was lying, but  wasn’t really a liar. He was a terrible at lying anyway, so he tried to avoid it as much as possible. And this wasn’t dishonesty, not entirely- he wasn’t seeing anyone other than his clients. Of course, Sherlock came to mind because John’s thoughts wandered to him more often than not, but he knew that there was nothing more to it, just like there was nothing more to Katrina or Will or Amy; they were separate from this, from himself and home and his family. He had to hold onto that.   
  
Mary’s smile was still a little unsteady and John still felt like he was hiding something from her, but she  looked like she was finally calm after a week of being stressed and he didn’t want to ruin that. “I’m sorry. I know you wouldn’t. Things have been a little hectic at the hospital and I...” She shook her head and put a gentle hand on his face. It felt too heavy, too warm and kind for him to really deserve it. “I trust you.”  
  
John leaned in and kissed her then, hoping that if he reminded himself of this- of her, of the woman he’d fallen in love with three years ago, of the woman he’d been so sure he’d marry eventually- hoping that all of this would stop. He would stop feeling guilty, like he was lying, like he was betraying her, because he _wasn’t_ ; who else did he love more than Mary? Mary and the clear crystal blue of her eyes, the smile that could pick him out of the darkness of despair, the arms that had held him when he had had nowhere else to go to, beautiful, witty Mary. He was lucky to have her, he could never forget that, and not a day went by without him thinking of how lucky he was. He still woke up before her in the mornings sometimes and spent a good half hour by her side and being amazed that he had found her. He loved her. He’d do anything to make her happy. So he kissed her, to remind himself that she was here and that she could never be replaced. He kissed her because he loved her.   
  
And when he did the guilt still lingered and he felt more worried than he ever had before.


	9. Tension

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should add- as I should have earlier- that I try to update every Wednesday. 
> 
> Thank you so much for the kudos and subscriptions and views- you don't know how much I appreciate it.

Avoiding Mary that weekend wasn’t hard- she was needed at the hospital almost constantly and came back exhausted; what was difficult was trying to avoid his own thoughts. The less time he spent with Mary, the more time he spent thinking about the problem he’d created for himself.  
  
He should have known in the beginning, because it couldn’t have crept on him like this- he spent two days berating himself for not seeing it earlier and tried to keep himself as busy as possible. He found he had a lot of free time on his hands without Mary around and he wondered what he normally did with it all when he wasn’t in a constant state of strained confusion. He ended up doing things that he’d put off for so long he’d almost forgotten about them; fixing the crooked shelf in one of the cupboards in the kitchen, actually putting up  the curtains in the spare room; hovering the places both he and Mary had neglected underneath the furniture for so long that John was a little worried that something was living under there (there wasn’t- it was a watch Mary had lost a few months ago, a safety pin, some chocolate wrappers and an unidentifiable piece of black plastic); he even spent a good hour or so cleaning behind the fridge, and found things he had never wanted to find back there.   
  
It was Sunday night before Mary noticed the suddenly sparkling kitchen counters and dusted furniture, and she was surprised as she was a little suspicious. And although she obviously had more questions than the ones she did ask, John assumed she was too tired to really find out what was going on. She paused in the kitchen, looked at John, smiled a little and then turned in for the night after dropping a kiss on his forehead.  
  
He’d been fine until the kiss. He’d almost forgotten what he was trying to avoid until she had, and the guilt flooded back and crashed over his head and it was hours before he could finally force himself to sleep.   
  
When he did see Sherlock the next day, he came with a keychain heavy covered in a myriad of annoying little charms, and he looked so disgusted by it that John couldn’t help smiling.   
  
“Never let me agree to a date again,” he said, tossing the offending keychain at John.   
  
John caught it easily with one hand and the charms rattled. “You went on a date?” If John felt any sort of relief from the fact that Sherlock hadn’t enjoyed it, he dismissed it.  
  
“If you could call it that. I thought dates were for people who liked each other..” There was something about Sherlock’s irritation that was hilarious to John, but he imagined that Sherlock wouldn’t want to hear it if he did start laughing. .   
  
“Sometimes it’s not,” John said. “Sometimes you agree to things because you owe someone a favour, and occasionally it turns out better than you expect. I mean it...worked with Mary.”   
  
Sherlock’s annoyed expression seemed a little stiff, but John tried not to read into it. “But I didn’t agree to it. She’s really the only person who dares to talk to me. Everyone else won’t so much as look at me, because making eye contact reveals every dirty secret you have, apparently. I don’t see why they think their secrets need to be guarded because they’re all so _trivial_.”  
  
John hummed sympathetically. “What’s her name?”  
  
He grimaced. “Victoria. She’s...forceful and stubborn. She’s been trying to ask me for weeks and I have no idea why.”   
  
“I always thought you had the kind of face that broke hearts,” John said, leaning his head on his hand. Sherlock looked extraordinarily unimpressed by this and the man struggled to hide his amusement.  
  
“I have a mind that breaks hearts,” he muttered. “Never mind my-” Sherlock was cut off by a sudden scream- at least, that was what the sound from the toy attached to the keychain sounded like; what was meant to be an endearing little giggle sounded more like gravel and cutlery in a cement mixer, and when John looked up to apologise for setting it off, he found that Sherlock had the kind of expression on his face that looked like he was close to setting the toy on fire, and John laughed before he could help himself.   
  
“It’s not funny!” Sherlock said indignantly. “She said I had to keep it as a ‘souvenir’! What kind of souvenir sounds like something died?”   
  
“I think it’s meant to be cute,” John said, holding it up to get a better look at it. It was a small yellow dog; there was something about the lopsided bows on its ears and its crushed fur that made it look more miserable and desperate than cute. “I assume this means you won’t be looking for a second date?”  
  
“If I can help it. She’s persistent.” He shifted uncomfortably, as if he suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands or even the rest of his body. “John.”   
  
“Hmm?”  
  
“How do you...break up with a girl?”   
  
Sherlock had said before that he didn’t like asking for things. Help was something that he tried to avoid whenever possible because he was so convinced that it was a show of weakness. Sherlock Holmes did not depend on anyone, because dependence led to devastating disappointment.   
  
If he hadn’t told himself not to, he would have taken the seat next to Sherlock’s so that the distance wouldn’t be so intimidating, and the boy seemed to see that. He shifted a little to the side as if he expected John to sit there, but the man stayed put. Distance was good. Distance was essential.   
  
“Well,” John began, scratching over his ear, “it depends on what the girl’s like. How would she respond if you told her that you didn’t think a second date was a good idea?”   
  
“She probably wouldn’t listen to me.” He seemed a little put out by the fact that John hadn’t moved any closer, but there was nothing the man could do about that without making things more complicated than they already were. “I let her talk because trying to keep up with her exhausting. She likes it better that way anyway.” He sighed heavily. “Or maybe I  could just not show up the next time she tries to set up another date-”  
  
“And then I’ll hear about your body being dragged out of a lake a week later,” John finished for him, and for the first time, Sherlock actually laughed.   
  
It was the first time Sherlock had ever really smiled in all their sessions together. It wasn’t just a slight lift in his eyes this time, or an almost missed twitch of his lips; this was him ducking his head and grinning, and for a moment John felt like he had the first time he’d seen Mary’s smile: euphoric and triumphant for pulling that first laugh out of her. But it was different this time because this was Sherlock and he wasn’t like anyone else John had ever met. It was different, because John knew how he felt about this boy and the smile only made that more obvious.   
  
John wanted to hold him then, and it was only the boy’s faltering grin that brought the man back to himself.   
  
John cleared his throat loudly and looked away from the questioning look Sherlock threw him.. “I know it’s easier to try to ignore the problem and wait for her to figure it out by being more cruel to her, but that’s not-”  
  
“John.”   
  
He stopped, but he continued to stare determinedly at the painted fruit over Sherlock’s head.   
  
“John, look at me.”   
  
He reluctantly dragged his eyes back to Sherlock’s and found that all too familiar scrutiny. His skin suddenly felt uncomfortable where it was stretched over his bones  and his chest felt like it had shrunk suddenly and left his lungs to try and breathe in this new confined space.   
  
“What if I said I wanted to stay with her?”  
  
John frowned. “But you said-”  
  
“Never mind what I said; what if I wanted to stay with her?”  
  
This wasn’t how it worked. He’d had difficult clients of course, people who hadn’t wanted to be there but that had warmed up to him in the end and that he had come to understand.. They learned that he wasn’t their enemy; not a friend, but someone that they could trust and that would help them no matter how much they hated themselves or their problem.   
  
But not like this. John was challenged and judged and hated but not asked directly like this. This was supposed to be about Sherlock- and he would have added this, had it not been for the way it looked like the boy didn’t want to hear anything other than  a direct answer to his question. And with the way John was hesitating, it looked like Sherlock already had his answer before the man finally spoke.   
  
“I’d be happy for you,” he said quietly, even though his answer sounded and felt too much like what he thought he was supposed to say. He didn’t actually believe any of it, no matter how much he wanted to. “I’d tell you that.”  
  
“But you wouldn’t really be happy.”  
  
John wanted to argue (because it was what he was supposed to do, what his brain told him to do because it was _right_ ) but he couldn’t, not when Sherlock wouldn’t believe anything else. If Sherlock could see it, there would never be any point in lying, yet he would try to anyway.  
  
“Even if I liked her, you wouldn’t be happy,” Sherlock continued, pulling his knees up under his chin again and watching John with the same cold scrutiny that the man had briefly thought he’d finally set aside. “You probably never would be.”   
  
John sighed and looked away again. “This isn’t about me, Sherlock. It’s not supposed to be.”  
  
John was surprised when Sherlock didn’t push it any further. He expected the boy to argue, because that was what Sherlock did: he didn’t let things go until he was satisfied with the answer he’d gotten. He was just as stubborn and persistent as Victoria seemed, if a little more cold and reticent.   
  
But the atmosphere was icy and a lot less easy than it had been just a few minutes ago. There was no returning that smile to Sherlock’s face once John had made them change the subject. There was no point in trying to get anything else out of him either; John would remain a locked door for as long as possible, because he knew that if he allowed Sherlock to see, there’d be no going back. Admitting how he felt would be the beginning of a steady descent into something that John really didn’t want to think about.   
  
He stuck to asking simple questions about Sherlock’s drug use (“still clean”), if he’d spoken to his brother lately (“hasn’t come back from London yet”) or how his parents felt about their sessions (“we don’t talk about it”), and after another few painful minutes and five word sentences when  it was obvious that there was nothing more to be said or talked about, John surrendered.   
  
“If you want to leave, you can go,” he said wearily, even though he knew it would hurt if he ended up pushing Sherlock away.   
  
The boy stared at John wordlessly, and that really didn’t make him feel any better.   
  
“What do you want me to say, Sherlock?” he asked finally. “What did you want me to tell you?”  
  
The boy was silent for another beat, and then finally he said, “I don’t know.”   
  
John’s eyes lingered on the sofa where Sherlock had been long after he left. He didn’t expect the boy to come back.


	10. Repression

Yet he did; the next day he was there early.  John ducked out for a minute to check the phone in the main office for messages, and came back to find Sherlock already in his usual spot on the sofa, although this time he was curled against the right arm with a notebook over his knees.   
  
“Carl Powers.”   
  
John was still hesitating in the doorway when he spoke, but Sherlock didn’t look up.    
  
“What?”  
  
“I’ve been following the case since I was eight.”  
  
John shut the door slowly behind him and the click of the catch was loud in the room. He stayed pressed against the door as if he wasn’t sure if he was actually supposed to walk into the room- which was ridiculous, because this was his office. “Sherlock, what’re you talking about?”  
  
The boy finally looked up from whatever he’d been writing. “Carl Powers.” His eyes narrowed when John continued to look confused. “I’ve told you about this.”  
  
“No, you haven’t.” John moved slowly as if any sudden movements would cause Sherlock to disappear just as quickly as he had the other day. He wasn’t entirely sure if they’d chosen to forget about yesterday, or if Sherlock was working up to talk about it, but for now John would go along with it. He was Sherlock’s therapist after all, not his teacher or parent.  
  
Sherlock unfurled his legs and turned to face John as the man sat uneasily on his chair. “Carl Powers was eleven when he was found dead in a swimming pool London. He drowned, apparently.”  
  
  
Sherlock’s focus was fascinating, John thought; it made him seem so much older and more intimidating and brilliantly clever. John could see now why people stayed away; it was odd to see a human to look so terrifyingly  mechanical with such complete devotion and concentration of thought. It wasn’t human  for his eyes to darken the way they did, the way he didn’t seem to see anything in front of him while he thought, when he appeared possessed by his own mind. John couldn’t begin to imagine the level of discipline Sherlock needed in order to keep from completely falling under the weight of it without the drugs he’d depended on for so long.  
  
John settled back and tried to relax a little. Sherlock was too distracted to notice, but John was at least going to try and act less tense.  “Apparently?”  
  
“Something bothered me,” Sherlock muttered, tapping his pen against his lips as he leaned his elbows on his knees.. “He was a strong swimmer, so why would he drown?”  
  
He wasn’t entirely sure that Sherlock was listening, but John tried anyway. “Something in the water?”  
  
“Nothing. He shouldn’t have drowned, but he did. The water was clean, no one else  in the pool was affected, yet he died and by the time someone got to him, it was too late...and then there were his shoes.”  
  
“Shoes?”  
  
“Missing. Everything was left as it was, yet his shoes were...but why would they take his shoes unless it had something to do with his death? Or maybe he was poisoned? But how would his shoes be involved?”  
  
Sherlock continued until his voice was mostly an unintelligible mutter and he stopped paying attention to everything else around him.. John noticed that he didn’t pick up his pen again other than to tap it thoughtfully against his lips, and the man waited patiently until Sherlock had thought himself out of his reverie to speak again.   
  
“You said you’ve been following this since you were....eight? If the police think the case is as good as closed, why are you coming back to it?”  
  
It took Sherlock another minute to fully process the information, although he didn’t look entirely concious when he answered. “There was a small article in the paper this morning,” he murmured, tucking his pen into his notebook and closing it. “In remembrance or....” He waved his hand dismissively. “I hadn’t thought about the case in a while. Granted, it’s not like the police will listen to me if I tell them any of this now.” He looked up finally, a little more present than he had been moments ago. “And if you told them for me, they wouldn’t believe your source.”  
  
John frowned. “So you’ll stay quiet and let a murderer run free?”  
  
“I could be wrong, John,” he said, although the man knew he didn’t believe that. “It could be nothing at all.”   
  
The man shook his head as Sherlock tucked himself back into the corner by the armrest. “So this is how you spend your time.”  
  
“Outsmarting the police, yes. God knows they need all the help they can get.”  
  
And there was that grin again, the easy smile that the man hadn’t thought he’d see again for a good long while, starting at one corner of the boy’s mouth and spreading until it reached his eyes again, and John smiled back unthinkingly.   
  
But unlike last time,, their smiles faded naturally; the painful tension from before was gone now that they knew how to deal with something like this (and it was so insignificant, it seemed now- it had only been a smile, after all). It was good this way, this ease between them, and John realized that it was because Sherlock was... _happier_. John had succeeded, and although Sherlock was far from completely ‘fixed’, he was okay now. It was obvious in the fading shadows and the absence of the bruises, the restfulness in his shoulders and those _smiles_.   
  
And then  there was that silence that John had been dreading, where they didn’t meet each other’s eyes at all and the man waited for Sherlock to demand another answer from him.  
  
Sherlock’s voice was quiet though, calm and deliberately careful. “Are we going to talk about yesterday?”  
  
“Do you want to?”  
  
Sherlock’s nose wrinkled a little. “Not really.”  
  
John shrugged. “Then we won’t.”  
  
Sherlock met his eyes just to make sure, and then nodded slowly and John let go of the breath he hadn’t known he was holding. The strain caused by their disagreements was so heavy that it almost felt tangible, and John had never felt something so intense before. He’d never wanted anything so consuming and unpredictable, but he strangely wanted it with Sherlock.   
  
Which of course was a terrible thought to have and he cleared his throat suddenly  as if that would cover up the thoughts that no one had heard in the first place. Sherlock threw him an inquisitive look but thankfully spared him any questions.  
  
But when he thought about it later, John wished he had hadn’t been so naive as to think that it was ever going to be this easy.


	11. Ties

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really need to stop being so tempted to update more than once a week, because eventually I'm going to fall behind. 
> 
> Anyway. 
> 
>  People have been asking if John is going to stay with Mary.  
> Well, he doesn't have a choice, does he?
> 
> Happy Holidays/Doomsday everyone!

“‘In the case of choosing a career, I find nothing at all of interest. No amount of wealth could ever stop an ordinary job from being suicidally tedious, and any attempt to convince me otherwise is fruitless and pathetic.’”  
  
“Clearly, I wasn’t listened to,” Sherlock muttered as John continued to read under the boy’s hurried script, “‘You’ll  change your mind in uni’ he said. Honestly. I don't know why they bother making us write these essays, it's a bloody waste of time."  
  
John couldn’t help grinning. He could just imagine the fixed withered look on Sherlock's face through every day of school that he had to endure. John kept reading. “‘I’m sure there’s something you want to do that hasn’t occured to you yet, but don’t worry about making a decision now: you’re only sixteen-’”  
  
“Seventeen,” Sherlock corrected.  
  
John paused and looked up from the paper. His grin faltered. “Seventeen? When was your birthday?”  
  
Sherlock shrugged. “Friday.”  
  
“And you didn’t-”  
  
“What? I didn’t tell you? Remind you?” John suddenly felt uncomfortable as he slowly put down the paper. Sherlock visibly swallowed. “You’re my therapist. Why should it matter?”  
  
John didn’t have an answer for that. He licked his lips nervously. “I could have-”  
  
“Don’t,” Sherlock snapped, “I said it doesn’t matter.”  
  
John hated this- hated how the atmosphere had changed from warm to suddenly tense and constrictive. It had been at least two weeks since they’d decided not to talk about that day when John had nearly told Sherlock everything (everything he felt and probably things he wouldn’t know he felt until he had the opportunity to speak), but they couldn’t deny that there was no returning to the- admittedly- flimsy barriers that they’d had before.  It felt like they were miles away from that day when they had spent the rest of the session together with John weaving patterns through Sherlock’s hair to calm him down. Yet even though  they couldn’t go back to something so dangerous,John still craved it and it scared him just how much he wanted it. Now when their eyes met, John thought he could see the same hesitation in Sherlock. But they both knew that they couldn’t, and they’d agreed not to talk about it. So it stayed like this- easy if they forgot about it, and then painfully tense when it was brought up again.  
  
But there was also the fact that Sherlock still had a fading bruise on his arm from yesterday and their argument about it (that involved John asking what happened and Sherlock stubbornly  insisting that he didn’t want to talk about it)  was still fresh in their minds.  
  
John sighed and left Sherlock's essay on his desk. "They have a point though, making you at least think about it.  Do you have any idea what-"  
  
"Shut up."  
  
John gave him a stern, cold look and for the first time since they'd met each other, John felt like the adult- the kind of adult that he didn't want to be,  stern and hypocritical and unfair. Sherlock met his gaze evenly and it seemed like they were just going to spend the whole hour like this trying to out-glare each other, until Sherlock huffed and closed his eyes.  
  
"Sorry," he muttered, with the kind of reluctance that John knew was from being out of practice when it came to apologising.  
  
“It’s fine,” John answered stiffly. It became so quiet then that he almost thought he could hear his watch ticking. He didn’t like it.  
  
“There’s something bothering you.”  
  
John waited.  
  
Sherlock pursed his lips. “Me.”  
  
John sagged. He knew what Sherlock was talking about, but he didn’t want to focus on that now. They were over that.  “It’s not your fault-”  
  
“But it has something to do with me.” His voice was more forceful, argumentative and stubborn. “Don’t lie.”  
  
John met his gaze evenly. “This session is about you. What I feel isn’t important-”  
  
“It’s  important when it’s about me.” Sherlock’s eyes were a cold gray steel, and John felt his anger rise again at being defied.  
  
“It’s nothing,” he said sternly, glaring at Sherlock. “We’re not going to talk about it.”  
  
Sherlock was suddenly livid and John had never seen him this angry before. “What, so you keeping your distance is ‘all right’? Everytime you’re near me it’s like you’re holding your breath, as if so much as looking at me will kill you. That was all it was, wasn’t it? You...touching me-” John flinched “-holding me as if you actually cared, it was nothing? You acting like you cared, what was that?” A muscle in his jaw twitched as he tried to stop, but it was too late now. “Why are you treating me like I don’t even know what I’m doing? Why are  you treating me like  a child?.”  
  
John hated himself for it, but it was out of his mouth before he stop it. It was true anyway. He knew that.  
  
“That’s because you are a child.”  
  
Sherlock visibly flinched before he stood up, his hands clenched into fists by his sides, and he struggled with words as he tried to find the right ones, and eventually settled on, “I’m nothing to you.”  
  
“That’s not true.”  
  
Sherlock glanced at the photograph on John’s desk, of the framed picture of him and Mary standing in front of Big Ben like a picturesque London postcard. They were happy then. It had only been a few months ago too, and it was terrifying to John how things had changed so drastically since that picture. Mary was the same- vibrant as ever- but John didn’t know where he was anymore.  
  
“You love her.”  
  
John’s eyes snapped back to Sherlock’s. He was right. But unless John was really too far gone, he could hear jealousy in Sherlock’s voice and for a moment the man was truly horrified. What had happened with Alice wouldn’t happen again; that had been years ago, a mistake but something he’d known how to deal with. This wasn’t new or special or different. He had to remember that. Whatever he was hearing in Sherlock’s voice, it wasn’t there. It had never been there.  
  
“But I’ve seen the way you look at me.”  
  
There weren’t many things that really terrified John anymore. There was no point to fear, and his father had taught him that when he was younger. Now he had more adult fears, but there weren’t many of those either- he didn’t worry about dying (or even dying alone, as he had for years before), about losing important things like his house or his car. He worried about losing Mary or Harry, but since their mother had died years ago and dad was long dead, there weren’t that many people John cared enough about to lose sleep over.  
  
But then there was Sherlock, and he was suddenly front and center in John’s universe and fighting for attention with Mary (who should have been his one and only romantic priority) now he was starting to see just how much he’d given himself away, and how much he would never be able to take back.  
  
It was too late, and it had been this way for a while now.  
  
Sherlock didn’t wait for a response- John’s expression alone confirmed everything he’d obviously been thinking for weeks. He fell back onto the edge of his chair and leaned forwards with his elbows on his knees as he studied John’s face. “Something’s holding you back.”  
  
John pursed his lips. “You mean other than the obvious?”  
  
Sherlock glared. “Other than the _obvious_ , yes.”  
  
John was vaguely aware of nails digging into his palms but he tried to keep his expression calm. Being read like this was making his skin crawl, but he knew there was only so long that he could pretend for.  
  
“What happened?” Sherlock asked.  
  
Silence.  
  
“Tell me what happened.” Desperation.  
  
Silence.  
  
“John, please!” Anger.  
  
“Her name was Alice.”  
  
Sherlock’s expression didn’t change. He waited.  
  
“She was younger than you, about fourteen. It was all fine for a year. She used to burn her fingers and tried running away from home five times before I met her.”  
  
“And she fell in love with you.”  
  
Hearing it again like this wasn’t something he was ready for. He  could still remember her, and it wasn’t as if it had been long enough ago to be able to forget. They’d gotten along. She’d gotten better. She’d gotten attached. John hadn’t had the heart to let her go, at least not until she’d tried to kiss him, until he’d tried to explain to her that they couldn’t and that it was wrong and he didn’t feel for her like that, until trying to put her feelings aside nearly broke her.  
  
“It happens, sometimes,” John said, and his voice was too mechanical to really sound like his own- it was stiff and controlled and robotic. “You’re always told to be careful. They depend on you and became attached to you. You can’t pity them or lead them on. You have to let them go. So I let her go. She was just a child.”  
  
“Would you let me go?”  
  
John stared at the boy for long enough that he felt like time had stopped entirely and that the universe would stop moving until he confessed or lied, until he said something that would change everything.  
  
He opened his mouth a few times, looked away and then back again. And finally, when he felt like he his entire body was burning he sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose and said, “I can’t.”  
  
Sherlock didn’t say anything after that; another tense minute of silence passed before he slowly stood up.  
  
“Maybe when you realize that other people don’t matter, you’ll stop making yourself so _miserable_.”  
  
He let himself out.


	12. Breaking

He’d ruined it.   
  
It was immediately obvious to Mary. He didn’t even try to hide it: it was obvious in how his body was too tense, how he refused to speak and went straight to their room as soon as he got home. Even a fool couldn’t miss it. He spent a lot of time lying on his stomach and tearing himself apart for the next few hours and lost track of time. When he came around to Mary carding her fingers through his hair, it was dark and he didn’t know if it had been been minutes or hours since he’d fallen into bed.  
  
He turned his back to her but moved closer so that her hand stayed in his hair. He couldn’t look at her.   
  
“Bad?” she asked.   
  
He closed his eyes. “I don’t think that even covers it.”  
  
The thing that angered him the most was his own stupidity. If he just hadn’t  held Sherlock, if he hadn’t stayed with him and put aside that notebook and treated him like that, none of this would have happened. He hadn’t been professional about it, and he hated himself for being so pretentious as to think that his own will alone could stop this from happening. It was Alice all over again but it was worse, because it wasn’t just Sherlock who had fallen into this horrifying pit of despair that was unforgivable and unacceptable infatuation- John knew that he’d followed right after Sherlock and there was nothing he could do about it now. John cared for the boy more than he did anyone else, and he knew what he wanted when he looked at him; John didn’t want to hurt him and he knew that if Sherlock made even the slightest hint that he didn’t want anything to do with John ever again, he’d leave. He’d leave Mary too, just to spare her the humiliation and pain, because this was...disgraceful. Disgusting. Monstrous. She deserved better and so did Sherlock. This couldn’t happen.   
  
But John had no idea how he could possibly fix it when he still didn’t want to let Sherlock go.  
  
“John?” Mary’s voice was like knives to him now. He’d failed her and she was completely oblivious and he couldn’t tell her. “John, please. Just tell me how I can help you.” Her fingers trailed over his cheek and his closed eyelids. “I want to help.”  
  
Her fingers paused over his lips. “You’re back from the hospital early.”  
  
“ _John_ ,” she snapped, tapping her fingers sharply against his cheek. “Stop trying to change the subject.”   
  
He smiled slightly, but it didn’t last long. “I can’t.”  
  
“So you’re going to let it ruin you?” Underneath the frustration John could hear her fear, but he knew that she’d pull through. It wasn’t like John to give up like this and he knew that he was scaring her, but he knew that he didn’t have to worry about her so much. It wasn’t like she couldn’t take care of herself. People underestimated her. She was far stronger than John. She always had been.  
  
He sighed. “Even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t like it.” He opened his eyes cautiously, waiting for the new wave of guilt to hit him. But it didn’t. It was mostly despair now, which was slightly easier to bear. He’d take it.   
  
“Who has to know if you tell me?” she whispered. “You can’t keep secrets forever, John. And if this person...if they’re hurting themselves, you can’t hide it, you know that.”  
  
He put a hand over the one of his face. He wanted to tell her he loved her- because he did, of course he did, right now more than he ever had and it hurt- but he couldn’t. Not now, not after what he’d done.   
  
“It’s supposed to be confidential,” he hedged, and Mary pursed her lips like he knew she would. He did smile then, and her expression softened ever so slightly.   
  
“There was a...girl, last time. Back in London. That was why I was so stressed then, because of...her.”  
  
Mary’s fingers curled through his hair. “What happened?”  
  
“She was fifteen. I mean, it happens sometimes, but I didn’t think...but it got worse. At first I thought I was just imagining it because, you know, it’s not like...I just didn’t think it was that.” He paused. He focused on Mary, on her warmth and comfort to keep him calm even though he hated himself for needing it. “She...told me she was in love with me.”  
  
Mary’s hand slowed to a stop across his forehead. “And it’s happened again?”.   
  
“I think so,” he almost said, but that was closer to lying than he liked, and he’d lied enough. “Yeah.” He swallowed. “It has.”  
  
“You can’t lead them on, love.” She was right, John knew that, but hearing it didn’t make it any easier. Hearing it made him want to turn around and ignore it. Hearing it made him want to do what he wanted rather than what needed to be done, and that, clearly, was very, very bad.   
  
“I know I can’t.” He closed his eyes again. “I know.”  
  
“You care about them though,” she murmured. Her thumb drew circles over his cheek, brushed over his lips again. “You want to help them.”  
  
“I want to help everyone, Mary.”  
  
“But this was different. They made you happy.”  
  
He turned onto his back and  looked at her. He wasn’t sure if she knew the extent of it, but she understood enough that he realized that now he could stop pretending he was fine. His face crumpled and so did hers and that was the end of him trying to act like it wasn’t as bad as it was; because he’d had enough of not knowing what he was feeling, not knowing how Sherlock really felt about this- because the boy had his experiments and John really didn’t know the first thing about him-  not knowing if he could do the right thing and worrying that his entire life was just going to be a long list of failures, like never enlisting and letting his mother die.  
  
Mary pressed her lips against his, gently, with the barest touch of pressure. “It’s going to break you one day,” she whispered against his lips. “I don’t want it to, but I’m so scared that it will and I won’t be able to help you.”  
  
But Mary didn’t cry. She had always been so much stronger than John. Always.


	13. Trust

Trust  
  
He felt like shit.  
  
He felt pathetic and useless and idiotic, and he had never hated himself so much before. He couldn’t help anyone like this and even though he was aware of it when he woke up, he still forced himself out of bed and into the shower and then clean clothes; but it was only when he tried to make a cup of tea and ended up breaking the cup because his hands were shaking that he admitted he couldn’t do it. He cleaned up and then crawled back into bed- Mary had left hours earlier and her side was cold again- and when he eventually slithered out of bed again, he spent the day wandering around the house alone in his dressing gown and  trying not to care, and Mary found him sitting in the living room staring blankly at the TV when she came home. She stayed out of his way until they went to bed again.  He hated the silence and being left alone with his thoughts, but then being with Mary hurt more. Seclusion was his best option.  
  
He resorted to distancing himself from his emotions and went back to work.  Maybe if he just kept pretending that he was fine and that he hadn’t ruined everything, he’d start to believe it, he thought. It wasn’t the end of the world after all; if letting Sherlock go was what he had to do, then he’d do it. He couldn’t be any more selfish than he already had been.  
  
And of course, it was doomed to fail.  
  
And he waited; tried to focus on his notes as he waited for Sherlock to come in, even started organizing things on his desk and finally putting them in their proper places. But when his books were actually on the shelves and he could see more of desk than the small patch the size of a beer mat, Sherlock was nowhere to be seen.  
  
He didn’t show up.  
  
John called just to make sure everything was okay, but there was no answer. Emails garnered no replies, calls turned up nothing, until he received an email from Sherlock’s father two days later saying that he was no longer needed.  
  
And then John gave up as he should have done weeks ago.  
  
Sherlock had let him go, because John no longer had the strength to do it himself. Either that, or Sherlock was saving himself from an old man’s infatuation. Thirty-eight and seventeen were too far apart and nothing would ever make that okay. John just had to deal with it.  
  
Telling himself to get over it and actually getting over it, however, were two different things.  
  
It was impossible.  
  
Of course Mary saw it, but no amount of asking what was wrong produced an answer. It was more than just losing a client, she knew, but he brushed it off; He was just sad, that was all, upset over nothing. It would pass. Someday he’d stop looking at things and wanting to tell Sherlock about them  because it looked like something the boy would be interested in; someday he’d regret ever letting things get out of hand; someday he’d stop regretting the fact that Sherlock never got around to holding his hand-  
  
It was wrong to want it, John knew that perfectly well. But this was different from loving Mary; this was new and exciting and terrifying and painful and far more intense than anything he’d ever felt for her, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Sherlock was a boy. Sherlock was a whole two decades younger and they both knew that, and that should have put him off.  
  
It didn’t.  
  
Autumn ended. The cold set in and John had to start scraping ice off of the windshield of his car every morning again. The Christmas adverts started- earlier, John thought, than they had last year. People started bundling up again and complaining  about the weather, and it snowed. John could remember a time when he wished for snow, and now there was too much of it:  enough that schools were closed and John found himself looking for Sherlock when he went out before he could help himself.  
  
It was unhealthy, he reminded himself. Sick.  
  
But he thought about Sherlock even more than he had before, and he hated himself for it. He could focus on work and on helping people when he distanced himself, but as soon as there was an opportunity, he thought of Sherlock and wondered how he was; wondered if he was doing okay in school, if he still had those bruises from ticking off a group of kids again, if he still came home to men in dressing gowns, and if he he’d gone back to his drugs.  
  
The drugs worried John the most. That was probably why the memory of Sherlock lingered, and why he was there when John fell asleep. The first time he had a dream about Sherlock,  he lay awake for hours afterwards just trying to remember it exactly as it had happened. He knew that dreaming about the boy was just another step further in the wrong direction, but he’d stopped caring. It wasn’t the dream itself that was most important; it was the feelings it had induced, when all it had been was the memory of one of their sessions.  
  
He had never felt happier than in that dream, he realized.  
  
Mary must have said something, because the next time Harry called, she insisted on talking about it. It was the exact reason why he hadn’t dared breathe a word to her earlier:  because Harry would force him to look at himself and how he felt, and he didn’t want to. It was pathetic and cowardly, but he was too afraid to do it. And to think, he thought disgustedly, that he’d wanted to be a soldier.  
  
“From what I hear, you’re acting like someone died,” she said first. John didn’t bother reminding her that ‘hello’ wouldn’t kill her- he’d given up on that ages ago. He sighed instead.  
  
“Oh, I can just imagine the look on your face,” Harry laughed, “I know that sigh. It’s that tired. ‘I can’t believe I have to deal with this’ sigh.”  
  
He didn’t answer.  
  
Harry’s voice was unusually soft and  almost considerate. “Did Mary leave?”  
  
Mary watched as he moved from the living room into their bedroom with the same worried eyes that she’d had for the past few weeks.  He closed the door behind him. He wasn’t entirely sure why he did. He didn’t have a good reason to hide any of this from her.  “She’s still here. Even though she deserves better.”  
  
Harry tutted over the phone. “Don’t be like that. You know she loves you.” She paused. “And you love her?”  
  
“Of course, I do Harry,” he said exasperatedly.  
  
“But?”  
  
“There isn’t a ‘but’.”  
  
“John.”  
  
He gritted his teeth. “Did she say she was going to leave?”  
  
Harry was silent for just a beat too long. “No. I mean, she said that you were acting sort of...and I can see it, I mean. You _are_   being too distant. Something’s going on.”  
  
Shit.  “It’s really nothing to worry about. I’ll figure it out-”  
  
“But I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out for weeks! Don’t be ridiculous, John, something’s bothering you and you need to talk about it before it kills you. Mary’s worried about you. We both are.”  
  
“It’s not that serious,” John muttered stubbornly.  
  
Harry gave an irritated huff and John pursed his lips.  
  
“It’s not like I can talk to you about it anyway,” he said wearily. He’d come to terms with this earlier. “It’s...”  
  
He couldn’t. He was still ashamed of himself. It wasn't something that you just said- this was different from confessing that you liked someone else while still dating another person. Harry had asked him only a few months ago if he was going to marry Mary. And if it hadn’t been for everything that had happened, they both knew that he would have proposed by now. They should’ve  been planning their wedding now- and John could see it if he thought about it, see the dresses and the centerpieces and flowers and every other detail that he hated and would think was unnecessary but that he knew he’d love if it was all for Mary. And he could still imagine proposing- cooking dinner and being lovely for a week before he got down on one knee for her. Nowhere public, nothing extravagant; something private and romantic and something both of them would remember.  
  
But now he was torn and it hurt to even think about it. The wedding dresses were stained with black and the ring in his mind’s eye had blackened and shrivelled and everything he’d looked forward to just a few months ago suddenly didn’t seem possible anymore. No matter how much he wanted it and how hard he tried to grasp it, it would always be out of his reach as long as he stayed like this. The more he thought about it, the more he receded into himself, and he knew that if he kept this up he’d have nothing left for Mary and that wasn’t fair to her. He couldn’t marry her when he was like this, not yet. She deserved better. They barely spoke now when they saw each other, and he wouldn’t even touch her. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even kissed her, and that wasn’t like him.  
  
“John,” Harry said, bringing him back to the conversation. “I know I’m notorious for not being able to keep secrets, but you know there’re some things I can never tell anyone. I might not keep all of them, but I know which ones are important.”  
  
John was perfectly aware of this and he was impossibly tempted to tell her right then, even if it meant  speaking quickly so that he couldn’t take back the words. He couldn’t hold on to something like this forever, not something this big.  
  
But this was exactly one of the reasons why he had tried to avoid calling his sister as much as possible: there was the promise of a secret-keeper, the one person that John could trust when he couldn’t trust Mary, one person who he’d known for years and that he knew he could rely on. Harry could keep a secret.  
  
But he couldn’t tell her this one.  
  
“Later,” he said eventually, “I’ll tell you later.” When she was about to protest, he stopped her. “Please. I can’t right now. It’s really bigger than anything I’ve ever told you, Harry.”  
  
And I don’t want my sister to think any less of me than she probably already does, he wanted to add.  
  
Clearly frustrated, she said goodbye, warned him again that trying to act like the older brother wasn’t going to get him anywhere,  and hung up.  
  
John thought that perhaps he’d imagined it, but he thought he heard footsteps moving away from the door and back to the living room. **  
**


	14. Wake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is also being updated on [FF.net](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8674717/1/White) (if I haven't mentioned that already).

John had begun to hate the rain again.  
  
He hadn’t cared about it for years. While everyone else saw fit to start conversations about it- and John was a prime offender, there was no denying that- John didn’t actually care. It was water. Cold, and sometimes it fell diagonally for some god forsaken reason, but it was water all the same. And it was peaceful, once, when it didn’t remind John of one of his most conflicted days..  
  
But it wasn’t the gentle sigh of rain this time; it struck like thunder and  became vicious with the wind, and the pavement was almost entirely empty as John drove through town after work. In the time it had taken him to run from the building to his car, his jacket was soaked and the rain had felt like small bricks against his head. There was a reason why the streets were deserted, and he wondered if making the trip down to the supermarket now like he’d planned  was really worth it.  
  
He never did get around to that grocery shopping.  
  
John didn’t know what compelled him to stop- the figure on the pavement was the only person who dared to walk in weather like this, and their hair and clothes were soaked; there was also the fact that they were a mere tall, dark smudge through his rain-streaked windscreen, and it could have been anyone from a perfectly innocent girl to a serial killer, but John didn’t think about that. He  felt compelled to slow down and ask the person if they were all right. People didn’t trust each other enough to offer help anymore (and for good reason) but John had to stop. If it killed him,, he didn’t really care. First and foremost, helping people was his job.  
  
He rolled down the window, leaned across the other seat to talk to them, and stopped.  
  
Sherlock stared back, but he didn’t seem to actually see John; he looked so vacant and lost and resigned that for a second John was afraid that he’d finally lost him. All of the work he’d done, all of their hours together and the first smile he’d pulled out of Sherlock- it was all for nothing now, and it was so painfully obvious in the bloodshot eyes and dark shadows, the cut lip and uncut hair.  
  
John pulled back from the window and took hold of the steering wheel again.  
  
“Get in,” he said.  
  
Sherlock didn’t move at all for at least another few seconds before he opened the door and climbed in, bringing a small body of water with him.  
  
Neither of them spoke for a while, and the silence was almost suffocatingly heavy. He would have turned on the radio, but he it didn’t feel right to. He didn’t like the quiet, but he didn’t want the intrusion of other people’s voices-  
  
“Don’t take me back home.”  
  
Sherlock’s voice was exactly as cold and mechanical as it had been the first time they’d met; , and there was the guilt again, pulling at John’s chest at the sound of it. He’d almost missed the guilt, , until it reminded him of just how heavy it was.  
  
“I wasn’t trying to get home,” he continued. The boy sounded exhausted even though he was trying to his best to pretend that his apathy transcended his own tiredness. . John hated it.  
  
“Where were you going, then?”  
  
The boy didn’t answer.  
  
“Where do you want me to take you?” John tried instead.  
  
“I don’t know. Just not home.”  
  
John stared straight ahead and gripped the steering wheel until it hurt his hands. There were other options of course, other, better options; others that John only briefly considered before he decided on a plan of action.  
  
He turned back onto the road and kept driving.  
  
When he pulled up outside his own house, Sherlock didn’t protest. He followed after John out of the car, but hesitated at the doormat when they got inside and refused to move no matter how many times John told him that he didn’t care about the wet clothes and the water.  
  
John watched him. The boy shivered, but he didn’t even seem alive; his eyes had lost even that suspicious gleam and the green and blue of his eyes had faded and grayed. He looked like he’d disappeared and left his body behind and it terrified John because he wasn’t sure if he could fix that.  Other people seemed so easy in comparison, because other people didn’t have this boy’s mind. Sherlock Holmes was something else entirely, and who knew what it was doing to him now and what it had been doing while John had been stupidly moping about his house like some _pathetic_  teenager?  
  
Sherlock had depended on him, and John had given up on him.  
  
John left him there for a while and returned to find Sherlock still standing exactly as he’d left him, dripping in the hallway.  
  
“I ran a bath,” John said, “but if you’d rather use the shower I think you can figure it out. I left some clothes out that I think’ll fit while I dry yours.”  
  
Sherlock still looked as dead as he had been when John found him, and the man was torn between taking a hesitant step forwards (just to touch him and make sure he was still there and still breathing)  or just walking away and leaving Sherlock  to choose what he wanted to do.  
  
After another tense minute of Sherlock staring blankly at John’s face, he moved past the man and upstairs towards the sound of running water. John listened to the sound of his squeaking shoes until the door closed behind him and the water stopped,  before he went to pick up Sherlock's wet clothes and leave dry ones outside the door. Even if Sherlock refused to speak to him, he wasn’t going to let the boy freeze.  
  
After throwing the wet clothes into the washer, John tried to keep himself occupied with making soup (from the packet, because it was easier, and not because John wasn’t even entirely sure how to make soup from scratch)  and got as far as making himself a cup of tea before he began to struggle with his thoughts again. He was beginning to realize just how long it had been since he’d seen Sherlock, since he’d felt like things were calm and uncomplicated and almost simple; but it could never just be _simple_ with Sherlock, and it had been impossibly stupid to think that not admitting to the problem would solve anything. He leaned against the counter and drank his tea without tasting it, and tried to think about what he’d do next.  
  
He’d brought Sherlock home, and he was starting to wonder if that was really a good idea. What would Mary say if she came home and the boy was still here? It’d be different if Sherlock was an adult- then, John would only be helping someone else and no one had to get suspicious. Or maybe, if anyone had seen them, no one _was_  suspicious and John was just being paranoid. All he’d done was try to help Sherlock before he gave himself pneumonia wandering around town in the pouring rain. That was all. He’d do the same if he saw anyone else he knew in the same situation- and even people he didn’t know, if they were willing to accept his help.  
  
Or maybe it wasn’t all just useless paranoia on John’s part; the incident with Alice meant that everyone kept a close eye on him nowadays. It wasn’t his fault, he’d been told, but there was still the _suspicion_ ; perhaps a girl couldn’t become so infatuated with an older man of her own volition, and John needed to be watched just to be safe. John had seen it, obviously, in how the teenage clients suddenly disappeared from his client list until Sherlock came along. And maybe they were right, John worried; maybe the last time hadn’t just been Alice’s fault. Maybe he was doing something. Maybe he was dangerous.  
  
Monstrous, even.  
  
He was still leaning against the counter with his cup of tea when Sherlock finally came downstairs, wearing a pair of John’s trousers (too short) and a shirt that hung off his body like a sheet. Sherlock was considerably thinner than the last time John had seen him and he couldn’t ignore the angry red pockmarks on the boy’s arms. And there were the bruises too, yellowing and fading, but still obvious.  
  
Sherlock’s hair was still slightly damp and the longer strands dripped on his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to care. He looked a little unsteady on his feet as he moved forwards, like moving too quickly would make him topple over, but John was frozen by the sink and didn’t think of trying to help. It was only when Sherlock was painfully close that he realized the boy was reaching for the soup John had left sitting next to him; but when Sherlock looked up, he completely forgot about it.  
  
They were too close, closer than they ever had been, and enough that John’s eyes almost crossed when he tried to directly look at him. He could feel the heat from Sherlock’s body against his own, see the deep shadows under the boy’s eyes and the hazy green of his eyes. He looked better for having taken a bath, but he still looked exhausted. But that wasn’t what John focused on; what took up every facet of his concentration was the fact that his lips were mere centimeters from Sherlock’s, and any movement from either of them would-  
  
Sherlock didn’t move. John’s hands were still clamped tightly around his cup and breathing was starting to get harder, but neither of them moved or blinked; it was like a  man hanging from a cliff by his fingers, desperately waiting for help or a miracle or death but not knowing which he’d rather prefer or which one he’d get. And he kept hanging there between them for far too long, until Sherlock’s eyes finally dropped to John’s lips and flicked back up again.  
  
The look in his eyes was bold and challenging and John didn’t know if he wanted to take it.  
  
Sherlock lingered for another moment before he stepped back, took his bowl of soup and took himself to the living room without looking back.  
  
John stayed in the kitchen with his knuckles turning white  around his cold cup of tea, knowing that if another second had passed, he would have given up entirely and that he wouldn’t have regretted it in the slightest. **  
**


	15. Push/Shove

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It's technically still Wednesday where I am but I still apologise for this one being late_
> 
> Thanks again for the wonderful comments and the kudos and just for reading this. 
> 
> And, you know, criticisms are totally welcome.

“I need to take you home.”  
  
John had kept out of his way for the last few hours, but he obviously couldn’t avoid Sherlock altogether; when John finally ventured into the living room, Sherlock had found the remote and was idly flicking through channels from where he was curled up on the sofa. Looking at him now, John realized that he’d missed this: even though the boy’s shoulders were too tense again and he looked just as small and vulnerable as he had the first time John had seen him like this, he missed the familiarity of it;  missed the boy’s smile and how he always had his feet on the sofa  even though it made the cushions dirty and pissed John off when he had to clean it later.  
  
Sherlock ignored him.   
  
“You can’t stay here,” John said more loudly.   
  
“Why not?”  
  
John folded his arms and leaned against the doorframe. “Because it’s getting late and you should be home by now-”  
  
“And you don’t want your girlfriend finding out that you brought me here and because I make you feel guilty,” Sherlock finished for him, leaning his head back to look up and meet John’s eyes.   
  
John said nothing, and Sherlock gave a lengthy sigh before turning back to the TV. He kept flicking through channels without pausing.  
  
In all the time they’d spent together (a few short weeks at most), John hadn’t really gotten around to taking everything in; now that the had the time, he found himself watching Sherlock’s hands: the tendons that moved under his skin and the long, elegant fingers, the bitten skin around each fingernail (more severe on his index finger  than anywhere else); the dark curls of hair that he could see over the sofa and the sharp corner of his nose-  
  
He couldn’t pretend that he hadn’t dreamt about this- not about kissing or sex, but about being _near_  Sherlock and being allowed to _touch_ -  
  
Sherlock suddenly sighed and John jumped, and either Sherlock elected to ignore it or just didn’t see it as he uncurled himself from the sofa. “I can’t stay where I’m not wanted, can I?” He didn’t wait for John’s reply, and instead headed for the soft thump of the machine to get his clothes.  
  
Sherlock was very careful to pass John without touching him, and the man tried not to focus on that.   
  
John got his keys, sat on the arm of the sofa, and waited. He wondered if he’d tell Mary about this- but why would he lie? He hadn’t done anything wrong. He hadn’t done anything to necessarily make him guilty, but he still felt like he had to lie. He dropped his keys while he was worrying, and as he went to pick them up, his eyes fell on Sherlock’s notebook.   
  
He knew that looking through it without permission was bad, he couldn’t help himself. Brushing his fingers across the cover turned into touching, and touching led to  turning to the front page and then picking up the book.   
  
Sherlock, as John had seen before, had very hurried, messy handwriting when he rushed, but even naturally it wasn’t nearly as elegant as John had imagined. It made him seem a little more human when John could see where he’d crossed out badly formed letters, and the way his handwriting didn’t seem to have changed since primary school- simple but neat, and careful; meticulously detailed and systematically ordered, with bulleted lists and carefully drawn arrows and scribbled diagrams that John couldn’t make sense of in the short glimpses he dared to take.   
  
But eventually, the newer pages became sporadic. John kept turning pages until the words became bigger and more frantic, until he reached a page where Sherlock’s pen had screamed unintelligibly all over the page, until the middle was stained with blue and had the pen had torn through the other side-  
  
“Enjoying yourself?”  
  
John jumped, and the pages fluttered as the book fell from his hands and landed back on the chair with a snap. He swallowed and kept his eyes on the black cover of the book (immaculate and nothing like the last page; deceptively orderly and unmarked).   
  
Sherlock’s open hand was by John’s shoulder a second later, and the man guiltily picked up the book again.   
  
“I would have let you look at it, you know,” Sherlock murmured, and John almost allowed himself to hope then, because the boy’s voice was almost as soft and open as it had been all those weeks ago; “If you’d asked.”  
  
John  licked his lips nervously. “I know. I’m sorry.”   
  
He hesitated before he held out the book and then dropped it onto Sherlock’s waiting palm; but their hands touched and  lingered together for a second longer than really necessary. A beat later Sherlock was  taking a step forward, and his knee was just touching John’s thigh when the man snatched his hand back and turned his face away. He could feel the boy’s warm breath on his cheek, and he forced himself to keep his eyes open. He couldn’t _remember_  this or _savour_  it or acknowledge it any more than he already had.  
  
Sherlock was angry, of course, and John didn’t blame him. If they were the same age and John were doing this, Sherlock would have a right to be furious. John was leading him on, tempting him, not keeping away when he chose to be alone; John came back and looked for him and helped him, and that was why John deserved every punishment he got for this, for wanting to kiss the boy when he shouldn’t have, for wanting to trail his fingers along the long, pale arch of his throat, to curl his hands in Sherlock’s hair and to draw his lips across hot skin and leave marks that would only ever been seen by him-  
  
John flinched as he came back to himself, as Sherlock called his name again. He didn’t meet Sherlock’s eyes, because he knew that the boy would know; but if he was reading, observing rather than seeing, it would be laughably obvious to him.   
  
There was nothing John could do about it now, even with trying to turn away in order to avoid temptation, and as he met Sherlock’s eyes, there was no surprise there.   
  
“Why don’t you do what you want?” Sherlock asked exasperatedly. He sounded as frustrated as John felt.   
  
John didn’t have a good enough answer to any of the boy’s questions, so he stayed silent and let Sherlock be angry.    
  
Sherlock threw him another glare before he left the room, and after the front door slammed behind him, John let his head fall into his hands.


	16. Heat

John could feel the tension rolling off of Sherlock in waves, and the silence in the car was suffocating. The only words the boy spoke were barked instructions ( _right_ and _left_ and _turn here_ ) and John could feel himself getting more and more irrationally irritated the closer they got to Sherlock’s house; it was no surprise then that, they ended up yelling at each other.   
  
It was still raining when they stopped (around the corner and out of sight of the house) although it was lighter now that the wind had died down. The street was quiet and empty, but no more than it usually was on a regular day; it was the kind of neighbourhood that could drive a person mad with its calm silence. It was pleasant, but frustratingly ordinary. Over the squeak of the windscreen wipers, the hum of the engine was annoyingly clear.   
  
“How long are you going to keep pretending that you know what you’re doing?” Sherlock asked. John would have almost felt cowed by the venom in Sherlock’s voice if he wasn’t just as angry. But John kept his mouth shut.   
  
“You’re still trying to treat me like a child.”  
  
John clenched his jaw.   
  
“If I was older,” Sherlock said- and his voice was still hard and angry, but still hopeful against his better judgement- “if I was older, it wouldn’t be like this-”  
  
“So you think that if you were older, I’d run away with you?” He turned to face Sherlock- or glare, rather, because there was no patience left in him to be kind anymore (and it was John’s fault really, for not retreating when Sherlock gave him the chance).. “Is that it? You think my life revolves around you? You’re the only person that matters?”  
  
John didn’t notice Sherlock’s expression waver, but he should have.   
  
“This shouldn’t even have happened in the first place,” John continued, “I don’t even know what it is about you that’s making this so _difficult_.” He turned back to stare straight ahead, through glass that was blurring with water. “We shouldn’t be like this. I have people to worry about and so do-”  
  
“So do I?” Sherlock snapped. “You mean like the father who cares more about Mycroft than me, who thinks I’m a _failure_? Or do you mean the mother who spends so much time _fucking_  that she doesn’t care who’s at home any more? She doesn’t  even remember that she _has_  another son, but at this point I don’t even care. I don’t _have_  anything, _John_.”  
  
John opened his mouth to protest, but Sherlock suddenly clutched at the collar of John's shirt and pulled him forwards, and his fingernails scratched against the man’s skin. This close, the bloodshot eyes and pale, tired skin were painfully obvious, and the boy looked half-mad with exhaustion and frustrated desperation.   
  
“I’m not the center of anyone’s universe, do you understand?” he spat. “ It doesn’t bother me, and it was never meant to bother me, but then you just _waltz_  right into my life and _use_ me, and then you have the audacity to pretend that not caring will solve everything? Because you can’t possibly matter to me? Because, what, I’m too young to understand?  Are you _stupid_?” He tugged at John’s collar, forcefully, and John’s neck twinged painfully as Sherlock’s voice rose. “ _Are you_?”   
  
John swallowed. Sherlock’s breathing was heavy.   
  
Sherlock shoved him away, and turned towards the window.. “I don’t know what it is. You could shoot me and I’d still...but I trust you.” If John hadn’t been paying attention, he wouldn’t have noticed how Sherlock’s voice shook, or the hand that trembled on the boy’s thigh.. “I trust you not to give away my secrets and I trust you to not give up on me, but I don’t want to trust you to do the right thing.”  
  
“I know-”  
  
“No, you don’t,” Sherlock laughed humourlessly. “I’m sure the right thing is something along the lines of shipping me off to another counsellor and forgetting about me, right?” He didn’t look back for confirmation, but he knew. “When I say I don’t want to trust you, I mean I know you should give up on me but I don’t want you to."  
  
John would have argued that he wasn’t going to give up on Sherlock, but then he knew he already had, and he held his tongue before he tried to say anything else. He was starting to wonder if giving in would really be so terrible.  
  
“I know you love Mary.”  
  
John nodded, but it was uncertain, and for a second he panicked. He knew he loved Mary, it wasn’t something to think about or a puzzle to be solved: it was a plain fact that he’d known for years now. Yet the fact that Sherlock didn’t seem surprised by John’s hesitation was enough to make the man feel worse- not that he didn’t deserve it at this point, he thought.   
  
“I hate her.”  
  
John’s eyes narrowed, but Sherlock didn’t seem to be paying attention. He concentrated on the window, but whether his focus was on the condensation fogging the glass or something outside the window, John couldn't tell.  
  
“I know I haven’t met her and I don’t know her, but I know that she’s a doctor and she works irregular shifts. I know that she has a need to help people that’s as strong as yours, I know that she’s clever and beautiful, and I hate her for it. I hate that she’s  the one you should spend your life with. I hate...” He hesitated, become just aware enough to really think about what he was saying, but said it anyway. “I hate that...she’s seen you. Every part of you. That she knows you, that she has all of your attention, that she can touch you and that she's your priority.” He took a deep breath and it shook on the exhale. “ I hate that I can’t take her place. I hate that she has no idea how lucky she is.”  
  
Sherlock hadn't looked back from the window once, and John was caught again behind the barrier he’d tried to put up again (although it was like trying to dam a river with only his hands and mud- every half-hearted attempt would get washed away and he was slowly giving up). He wanted to reach out and touch Sherlock, to comfort him like he had before, but it was such a _terrible_ idea.   
  
He cleared his throat, and although the sound was too loud in the close confines of the car, he spoke as Sherlock watched his reflection in the glass. “I know I gave up on you. For a while. I thought that was what you wanted. “ Sherlock glared at him through the window, and John winced. “But this... _this_ -” he gestured to the air between them, still taut like a string (it felt like it was fraying now though, but he couldn't let it break)- “isn’t going to work. What the hell would I tell Mary anyway?”   
  
Sherlock shifted uncomfortably as if he was debating whether or not to say something, but he said it anyway, “I really couldn’t care less about Mary.” .   
  
John closed his eyes and stifled a sigh.   
  
It was frighteningly easy to forget all about her when he was around Sherlock, John admitted, and although he wanted to tell Sherlock this- because he was sick of not saying things and he knew how bad that was for his own health- now wasn’t the time.   
  
But maybe he was thinking too far ahead, John thought, and maybe what they both needed was to just...try.   
  
John was immediately met with opposition in his own head- a wild cacophony of thoughts that echoed a resounding _no_  at the idea; because no matter how different this relationship was, it would still involve lying to Mary while seeing someone else, and John never thought he’d be that kind of man.  
  
Then again, all of this could fall through, and Mary would never have to know. It’d just be a small episode in his otherwise mediocre life, and he and Sherlock both be content with the fact that they had tried and had enough and could get on with their lives. If all of this was just temporary (if incredibly intense) infatuation, then it would run its course eventually. No one had to get their hearts broken.   
  
“Maybe she doesn’t have to know.”   
  
Sherlock stared. John couldn’t really believe he’d said it either, but the more he spoke the more he felt like he was accepting his incredibly idiotic idea. “Maybe no one has to know.”  
  
“Are you suggesting we start a relationship without telling anyone and hope no one finds out?”   
  
John blinked. “I.....” Put like that, it was even worse than the way he’d framed it in his head (and iit was always about _framing_ , always about how an idea was put together and the processed, and it could change everything; it would have been fascinating if it wasn’t so frustrating). He shook his head then, coming back to his senses and back to the choice he knew he had to make (and he scared himself with how much he hated the choice, but there was nothing he could do about it now). "No. No, just...forget it. "     
  
John was about to say something else- maybe something about the next time they’d see each other, if at all- but a moment later Sherlock was shaking his head and opening the door and stepping out, and John was left staring at Sherlock’s rapidly disappearing figure through the rain.   
  
Again, he sighed. He’d done it again.


	17. Doubt

Mary came home to find John making dinner for the first time in weeks.   
  
She hesitated in the doorway for a full minute, just watching him work. He seemed relaxed for the first time in weeks, and she wanted to appreciate the moment before she tried to step into it.   
  
“So what did you break this time?” she asked, and she didn’t bother hiding her grin when John spun around looking startled.   
  
“What? No, nothing. Everything’s fine.” Mary’s smile slipped a little- she forgot, sometimes, when she wasn’t around him, how distracted he looked nowadays, how he was never entirely _there_  anymore; she still wondered if it was something she’d done, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if that was true- they’d both pushed people away before. In her case, John wouldn’t be the first, but she’d been hoping he wouldn’t be next.   
  
“You’re sure?” She raised an eyebrow as she strode forwards, lifting her arms and curling around John’s neck. “If I go upstairs I won’t find you’ve dyed everything pink because you mixed the the bedsheets with my white shirts?”  
  
John mocked offence, and Mary grinned; that was closer to him, to the John with the easy smiles that had always been hers- he didn’t smile at anyone else like that, and maybe it was naive to think so, but it was true. “I’m glad you have complete faith in me,” he said dryly. “And that was months ago.”  
  
“I have complete faith in you, John Watson,” she murmured, brushing her lips against his. “Just not when it comes to laundry.” John might have begun to say something else, but he was distracted and the words were lost.  
  
Mary couldn’t actually remember the last time they’d kissed like this, when John’s arms had been around her waist and his lips had been soft and warm and earnest against hers, when she’d pulled in closer and felt the sweep of his tongue against her own, when casual kisses had turned into heavy breathing and hands curled in hair and passionate desperation and she’d felt like maybe this relationship would be different from the others-  
  
John suddenly pulled away, and Mary was left grasping at air for a minute before he came back- apparently from moving a pot over so they didn’t burn the house down while they were so blissfully occupied with each other- but as he leaned his forehead against hers she relaxed again.   
  
John was a good man. They weren’t _nothing_  without each other, but they were so much better together, and even when they had their arguments (over silly, superficial things like whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher and whose fault it was that the washing machine had puked water all over the floor for the third time that week) she knew she couldn’t leave him. She loved him, and it was times like these when she remembered and it _hurt_  but in a way she never wanted to let go of.  
  
“I’ve missed you,” she whispered.   
  
He pressed another kiss against her lips- soft and lingering. “I’ve missed you, too.”   
  
She didn’t want to talk about it now, not when they were finally having a moment together after so long of being distant, but she had to. There was only much time she had in a day to confront him-  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
She frowned, caught between her own question and John’s words. “Why’re you sorry?”   
  
His hand moved along her waist, starting under her ribcage, stopping at her hip and slowly coming  back again. It was soothing. “For being useless for the past few weeks.”  
  
“You weren’t doing it on purpose. And you can still talk to me, you know,” she offered. “I want to help.” She didn’t want to add that when he was asleep she often stayed awake worrying over everything she could have done to cause this, even though he said over and over again that it was about work or Harry or just not her fault. She still worried. That was the problem with both of them; they often worried to the point where it made them sick.   
  
For a moment it looked like John was going to accept her offer; his face was open and warm, and there was that possibility written all over his face, like he was finally going to speak and they could work through it together and everything could go back to the way it had been, when she hadn’t felt like she had to walk on eggs around him and she didn’t feel guilty because she felt like she couldn’t trust him anymore.   
  
But he shook his head and smiled. “Not right now.” He let go of her and stepped back, turning back to dinner. “It’s fine. I’ll figure it out.”   
  
Mary tried to accept it, she really did, but she could see his smile slipping and the conflict in his eyes, and she was left feeling cold again and as if she didn’t know the man she’d fallen in love with anymore. And it was terrifying.


	18. End - Start

When John woke the next morning, he’d almost completely forgotten what he’d been worrying about the night before. It was the first time in a while that he’d woken up feeling like he’d actually slept  rather than wasting an entire night awake and restless. And he’d woken up with Mary still lying next to him, her hair drawn over the pillow, and her face calm and peaceful: she’d looked just as beautiful as she had the first night they’d slept together- not that she wasn’t always beautiful to him, but this was the kind of beauty that hid in early mornings and afterglow, the kind that he didn’t see as often as he liked.    
  
For a full heartbeat, he was entirely  consumed with the sort of overwhelming, emotional love that was inexplicable and terrifying and lovely-  
  
And then a moment later he remembered Sherlock and the feeling intensified somehow, and he recoiled suddenly from the deep, heavy longing in his gut.  
  
He closed his eyes, dragged a hand over his face, and wished he could spend at least one hour awake without being reminded of how he’d failed and what he couldn’t have.  
  
Mary woke up eventually, and before she could give up on work entirely to spend the rest of the day in bed, she got called in, and had to reluctantly pull herself away.  
  
(But not before she caught a glimpse of guilty relief in John’s face, the kind that made the last touches feel hard and insincere, and the icy, sick feeling in her stomach return).  
  
It took another hour after hearing the door close behind Mary for him to get himself out of bed too. Having the house to himself on a day off didn’t really excuse him from leaving the dishes in the sink for another three days (it wasn’t laziness exactly that kept him from loading and unloading the dishwasher, more a reluctance brought on by seeing that last night’s dishes hadn’t somehow wandered into the dishwasher by themselves).  
  
But he was halfway through sweeping the kitchen floor (after making the bed and doing the laundry and cleaning the bathroom- all of which he was quite proud of because it made him feel less useless and made it easier to think about things that weren’t Sherlock) when the doorbell rang.  
  
Mail, John thought, as he left the broom leaning against the counter and headed for the door. A package that couldn’t fit through the letterbox.  
  
But not Sherlock- who it turned out to be- standing at the front door still in his school uniform as if he’d been invited over.  
  
“You have a day off on Wednesdays,” Sherlock said before John could even start. "You switch off Wednesdays with Lipden.”  
  
John pursed his lips, dismissing his initial shock and aiming for authoritative. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”  
  
Sherlock looked at him as he slipped shamelessly through the door. “It’s four.”  
  
John had lost track of time as he’d been cleaning, but he was sure Sherlock was wrong until he checked his own watch (seven past four; most schools in the area were done by half three). Sherlock seemed more smug than he really had a right to be, at least until he looked over John and his smirk slipped a little. Before John could ask, Sherlock had looked away again and was taking off his shoes by the door.  
  
“Maybe you need less late nights.” Sherlock’s tone was a little bitter, if John wasn’t mistaken (which he was sure he wasn’t, because he was positive anyone could pick out the jealous tinge to the boy’s voice).  
  
Sherlock dumped his school bag next to his shoes and wandered into the kitchen. John followed after him and stopped to lean against the doorframe as Sherlock searched through the cupboards for food. John briefly thought about stopping him, but somewhere inbetween the door and now, he’d forgotten to mention that Sherlock wasn’t really supposed to _be_  here. “It usually doesn’t matter how late I stay up because I don’t usually expect the Spanish Inquisition to walk into my kitchen at four in the afternoon,” John said, watching as Sherlock reached for an unopened packet of Digestives. Sherlock ignored him and turned to the sink to fill the kettle.  
  
“Sherlock.”  
  
The boy flicked the kettle on and then fiddled unnecessarily with the packet, taking as much time as possible in order to avoid John’s eyes.  
  
“You know you can’t stay,” John said softly.  
  
“So you want me to go back to a house that may or may not be empty?” Sherlock challenged, tearing roughly at flimsy plastic and spilling the first few biscuits across the counter. He sighed. “Mary’s not here. You are.” He let the packet fall and picked up a Digestive as he rummaged through the cupboards again. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”  
  
John remained silent by the doorway, torn between forcing Sherlock out and letting him stay (because he wanted Sherlock to stay, and he didn’t want to be alone, but there was _Mary_  and the fact that he knew he didn’t want to destroy her trust with something like this).  
  
“She won’t come early because she’s busy with patients from some stupidly reckless party last night,” he went on, taking down teabags and sugar and a mug from the shelves. “And she promised to stop by a friend’s house later.”  
  
John frowned. “How did-”  
  
“Newspaper,” Sherlock cut in irritably. “And the note caught under the mat by the front door that you both missed.”  
  
John knew him to be petulant sometimes, but this was carefully but barely controlled anger; a strong emotion, but he wasn’t lashing out like he usually did (and John had taken the insults, taken the scathing ‘failed army doctor and brother’ all those weeks ago because while Sherlock would never apologise- then again, it wasn’t exactly _Sherlock_  who saw everything John hated about himself and shoved it ungracefully into the spotlight: when Sherlock was aware of what he was saying, it was different).  
  
John shrugged away from the wall and moved to stand behind Sherlock, because the distance felt caustic and was only making them both more uncomfortable. And besides, Sherlock was right: Mary wouldn’t be back for ages yet.  
  
(It was a terrible thought to have, he knew that perfectly well, but what Mary didn’t know wouldn’t kill her, and he couldn’t take the risk of losing her if this _thing_  with Sherlock was only  transient).  
  
He took Sherlock’s shaking hand away from the mug, and he felt the boy deflate beside him.  
  
“I can’t...go back,” he said, his voice small as he  squeezed the blood out of John’s fingers. “I just...need a place to not have to pretend for a while.” He hated being weak and John could feel it in the fingers that curled against his palm and in the rough, uncut nails grazing his skin. “Please.”  
  
John couldn’t argue then.  
  
\---  
  
“I think you’re coming down with something.”  
  
Sherlock grunted and hunched his shoulders further, as if that would stop his cheeks from looking less flushed and his body from shivering. But he still leaned in against John, leaving his empty mug on the coffee table before pulling his knees up.  
  
It was like that day in John’s office again, except now they were  in his living room with something trivial on telly that neither of them were watching. .But there was the same ease, a step they fell into as if this had been their lives for ages, rather than one rare occurrence on a dreary afternoon. And after a little while of staying curled up at John’s side, Sherlock unfurled across John’s lap, and the man’s hand found its way to Sherlock’s hair unthinkingly.  
  
It didn’t feel unsettling or wrong and John didn’t expect it to. He might have paused to memorize the softness of Sherlock’s curls and past scars laced across the boy’s scalp, but it strangely felt like he’d been doing this for months.  
  
(Almost like how it felt with Mary, he thought, except this was something else; but he shied away from _better_   and decided on _good_   because it eased his guilt).  
  
“You had sex with Mary last night,” Sherlock murmured. “Because you felt bad.”  
  
John froze. He looked down at Sherlock’s face, but it was vacant now; distracted, as if he was calm enough to fall asleep. John wasn’t going to ask how he knew.  
  
“And you’ve been wondering how you’ve managed to fall in love with two people at the same time,” he continued, still staring blankly at nothing in particular.  
  
Sherlock seemed completely oblivious to the fact that the hand in his hair had stopped and that John was staring.  
  
“Who said I’m in love with you?” John’s voice wavered uncertainly, and Sherlock turned to give him a disgusted look (although he didn’t move his head from John’s lap, because he was either too lazy to move or because he wasn’t irritated enough with John yet).  
  
“Present tense,” Sherlock muttered, closing his eyes and pushing his head against John’s fingers. “‘Am’ and not ‘was’. Just do yourself a favour and admit it. I’m the only one here, after all. It’s not like we’re under surveillance.”  
  
Even though it felt that way, John thought, what with his damned paranoia.  
  
It was true though, and it didn’t take much thinking to figure that out. He _was_  the only other person here, and if he thought about it, he was sure Mary wouldn’t mind if she came home and found the boy there (“He just needs a place where he feels safe for now,” he’d say, and he knew Mary would drop it and observe for a while, which gave them time, albeit time with growing suspicion). Sherlock’s sessions were being filled by Claire now, whose parents demanded John fix ‘him’ somehow, and while John wanted to help people, he still missed Sherlock. He missed hearing those deductions, seeing his eyes spark when John mentioned something he had extensive knowledge on,  seeing him slowly relax and and tell John everything, and when there was that smile that John had guiltily held onto in his memory.  
  
Sherlock’s eyes shifted to meet John’s. The anger wasn’t gone exactly, but there was hopefulness, and the longer John looked the more he was reminded of his own past  missed chances, and he sagged against the sofa as his fingers moved from Sherlock’s hair and trailed down over the boy’s lips.  
  
Sherlock kissed his fingers.  
  
“Is this what you want?” John asked as his thumb brushed across Sherlock’s cheek bone (a little sharper than he would’ve liked because Sherlock _still_  wasn’t eating enough). “No one can know about any of this.”  
  
Sherlock put a hand over the one on his mouth, and his lips trickled John’s fingers. “Honestly I’d take anything if it meant...”  
  
“This.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
When John didn’t make any move to leave or argue, Sherlock relaxed again against the man’s lap, and John’s thumb continued to draw across his cheek.  
  
Sherlock was beautiful. It was a relief to think it first, when he’d had the thought so many times but had stopped it because he’d been so ashamed of himself. But Sherlock _was_  beautiful: all dark curls and pale skin and sharp angles (John had never really _understood_  people’s fascination with cheekbones, but it looked like now he did).  It wasn’t the kind of thing that was noticed straight away;  It was like opening a book with a vaguely interesting cover and then suddenly realizing that it was so much more elegant and wonderfully complicated than previously imagined. Comparing Sherlock to a book still felt woefully inadequate- it wasn’t as if his personality was scratched into the walls of his skull in a way that John could read- but it was a sort of start. He’d have time later to memorize the the exact colour of Sherlock’s eyes (which fluctuated between cerulean and malachite and mahogany), the veins of blue in his closed eyelids and the pale flush of his lips...  
  
Then again, he had no idea how much time he really had left.  
  
It took John another minute to notice that Sherlock had fallen asleep; and after a few seconds of internal debate, he nudged the boy awake and half-carried him up the stairs. Apparently when Sherlock slept, he did so heavily.  
  
John got him into bed eventually (and  after a few nudges managed to force him out of most of his uniform so he wouldn’t crease it) and was about to leave when a hand caught his wrist.  
  
“No,” Sherlock murmured, but before he could explain he was gone, completely taken with sleep, and his fingers loosened on John’s wrist.  
  
And John stayed.


	19. Code

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this is late. I've been worrying over this since last week and I think that I need to post this now to stop myself from panicking over punctuation marks next. And if I don't update regularly, I'll abandon it altogether, and I don't think anyone wants that. 
> 
> Hopefully
> 
> Hopefully
> 
> I'll fret less over the next few chapters. I'm still aiming for Wednesday updates. 
> 
> Also thank you to catastrophe-curve for keeping me (somewhat) sane. I don't think you know how important your suggestions/comments/brilliant humour is.

John was still there when Sherlock woke up, which surprised them both. John hadn’t meant to fall asleep with his wrist still trapped in Sherlock’s fingers (Sherlock tucked under the duvet and John on top), but the sun was sinking beyond the horizon by the time he woke up. Sherlock was already awake and had been for a while: his gaze was less hazy and distracted than it had been. He still needed more sleep, but he was fine for now, he insisted. They were running out of time, but neither of them felt motivated to move.  
  
“You’re not worried,” Sherlock said eventually. “About this. Lying to Mary.”  
  
“Not really, no.” Mostly, he knew, because he ignoring it.  
  
John slipped his hand out of Sherlock’s fingers and rested his palm against the boy’s cheek. “You need to take better care of yourself.” Sherlock made a face. “I’m serious. You need your body as well as your brain, you know.”  
  
“I know,” Sherlock muttered stubbornly, but he was listening. John hoped he’d take Sherlock would take his words into consideration, but then Sherlock had a tendency to believe he didn’t need the advice (“I don’t see the point when it’s failed me before,” he’d say, and John would roll his eyes, dig out a cereal bar from the box in his desk drawer, and press it into Sherlock’s hand. It wasn’t much, but it was a start, and Sherlock would get right back into detailing his latest problem while spilling crumbs everywhere).  
  
He broke the rules with Sherlock,  giving him food;  letting him sleep in his own bed (they had a guest room: frigid, unused and filled with boxes); taking him home. It wasn’t very proffessional of him.  
  
He didn’t care anymore.  
  
Sherlock shifted closer until his hand could curve awkwardly over the duvet and around John’s waist, and his fingers trailed up along John’s spine, the  thin layer of his shirt like a  frustrating barrier between Sherlock’s touch and his skin. John could feel the boy’s speeding heartbeat under his palm. Their eyes met again, his dark and pupils flared. He swallowed against the sudden dryness in his mouth.  
  
“I’ve thought about you,” Sherlock murmured. “About being with you.  Touching you.”  
  
John’s eyes fluttered closed. The heat of Sherlock’s mouth was heavy on his lips, and there was that  tired musky smell of his breath and the heat of his skin. John’s chest felt tight, his skin taut over stiff, suffocating ribs. It would take an effortless tilt of his head and there’d be no distance between them, and he ached with want.  
  
“I want...” Sherlock’s fingertips stopped at John’s shoulder and shook, and John began to wonder if now wasn’t the time. Later would be better, when he was sure and could make the choice without hesitating.  
  
But Sherlock’s hand slipped down and splayed his fingers across the base of John’s back, palm heavy at the base of his spine. “I want you.”  
  
The first kiss was excruciatingly hesitant: their lips were dry and their noses got in the way and a steady tremor in Sherlock’s body made it more of  a chaste brush of skin than a kiss.  
  
And then Sherlock sighed in frustration, and before John could open his eyes and tell him they should stop, Sherlock was kicking off the duvet and he was being pushed from his side onto his back and the boy’s parted lips were over his- firm and desperate, but not restraining- and John gave in to the kiss, relaxed as Sherlock tilted his head and let his tongue flick across John’s bottom lip. One of them gasped- John couldn’t tell anymore and it didn’t matter- and his concentration was abruptly absorbed in the slick  heat of Sherlock’s tongue and incalescence of his breath. Hot skin gave way to soft cotton and fingertips found their way to buttons, under shirts and overly sensitive skin.  
  
John remembered kissing like this before, but  years ago, in a more careless time in secondary and uni: this hurt because he’d wanted it. There had almost always been <i>someone</i> and he was never starved of touch, but this was something he’d waited to have, and he’d never been very good at waiting for things like this. But the taste of Sherlock's breath was intoxicating,  and so were the heavy, desperate touches and kisses that were becoming softer, dirtier sounds; the fingers that boldly pushed the sleeve of his shirt off his shoulder and the splayed fingers that moved over his chest and never stayed in one place for too long; and the pull of teeth and lips and short, heavy breaths that tasted bitter with sleep.  
  
Sherlock shifted his focus John’s neck, peppering kisses from the corner of the man’s mouth to his neck. Brief touches became small nips and long sucks under his jaw and along his throat, and then a wet line drawn from John’s collarbone to his earlobe with Sherlock’s tongue. John tilted his head back automatically and his fingers curled in Sherlock’s hair, and his other hand danced along the waistband of Sherlock’s underwear.  
  
Sherlock flinched suddenly, and the kisses stopped.  
  
His hand was over the one on his waist, and John caught on quickly. He  opened his eyes, guilty loosened his fingers and moved back.  
  
“I can’t.” Sherlock swallowed but kept his face hidden under John’s jaw. “I’m not-”  
  
“I’m not asking for it,,” John whispered, rubbing the boy’s back. Sherlock’s shoulders were tight again. “I’m not going to.”  
  
“But you have sex with Mary.”  
  
John gently pushed his head up and made the boy look at him. “Doesn’t matter. We’re not talking about her,” he said firmly. “We’re talking about you.” He softened, loosened his grip on Sherlock’s face. ” Us.”  
  
“Us,” Sherlock repeated. There was something in his voice that was afraid; sceptical and conflicted. “There isn’t an “us”. He was still breathing heavily and his lips were a deep, flushed pink. His fingers curled and uncurled in the sheets; the heat from a moment ago was gone.  
  
He pulled back, untangled himself from John’s arms and slipped off the bed to find his clothes. “There’ll never be an “<i>us</i>”.” He found his trousers, pulled them on and looked for his jumper on the floor. “And I can’t give you what you want.”  
  
“Sherlock-”  
  
“You know it’s true!” he snapped, kicking his jumper away and dropping heavily on the bed. He was shaking. “I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”  
  
John sat up as Sherlock pulled on his shoes, his trembling fingers struggling with the simple knot in his shoelaces. He reached out  a hand to help but Sherlock slapped it away.  
  
“This was a bad idea,” Sherlock muttered, and John’s heart sank.  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
Sherlock’s shoulders sagged. The trails John’s fingers had made in the boy’s hair were still there, obvious and possessive. It didn’t feel good to see the mark he left anymore.  
  
“I need...” Sherlock finally wrestled his shoe on and stood, running a hand through his hopelessly dishevelled hair. His eyes wandered around the room, over the bedside table and the window the curtains that still didn’t match anything in the room; and they lingered on Mary’s slippers under the bed.  
  
“I need to think,” he said.  
  
He wavered for another second, swayed forwards as if he wanted to leave one last kiss on John’s lips befor he left, but he never did.  
  
A few minutes after he heard Sherlock leave, John heard a car in front of the house and keys in the front door.  
  
Whatever had been holding back his guilt earlier disappeared as Mary’s voice drifted up the stairs, looking for him.  
  
He’d never felt so filthy in his life.


	20. Aimer, adorer, passionner

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might take a break for the next week- so if there isn't an update next Wednesday/Thursday, don't panic: I just need to catch up. 
> 
> There's also the fact that I started working on a story that's beena WIP for about 4 years and I started another Merlin fic, and it'd be lovely if I knew how to juggle all of this without neglecting something, but I'm still working on that.
> 
> Also, thanks again for the comments and kudos and for just reading this story.

“We should go on holiday.”  
  
It was Wednesday night, John was tired, and he looked up from his book to stare at her. Mary stared back expectantly with her toothbrush hanging from her lips, and then turned back to the bathroom.  
  
“Somewhere far where we don’t know anyone.” She turned on the tap on the sink. “This weekend.”  
  
“What, like New York?”  
  
Mary laughed, and John smiled even though she couldn’t see it. “Not that far,” she said. She paused to rinse her mouth and put her toothbrush back. “It’d be, what, six, eight hours on a plane? No thanks.” She came back to the bedroom, bringing the smell of lavender soap and peppermint with her. “I was thinking more...Europe.”  
  
“Europe,” he repeated, as she let her dressing gown slip off her shoulders (he didn’t deserve her like this, when she looked so relaxed and calm and her skin seemed to glow with it in the soft light from the lamp on the bedside table).  
  
“Italy,” she murmured, climbing into bed and letting him put an arm around her shoulders. “Sicily.”  
  
“Paris,” they both said.  
  
They’d never been to Paris together. They’d been to London, obviously, Belfast and Edinburgh when they felt like it, but never Paris. Mary had been twice- once as a teenager and again in uni; John had been a few times with family. But never them, together as a couple.  
  
“I thought you didn’t like France,” she said, tucking her head under his chin. Her hair was still slightly wet, smelling of the shampoo she used when she had the time (something like blackberry and kiwi and orange).  
  
“I like _France_ ,” he said, pulling her in closer with his hands on her waist. “I said I didn’t like it the last time I went because Harry got drunk and told me everything about Clara and then I had try and stop our parents from finding out. It was about as enjoyable as getting my teeth pulled. Nothing against France, just...bad memories.”  
  
She hummed in response, curled on his chest as her breathing slowed. “So it won’t be a nightmare for you if we go.” Her words were beginning to slur together.  
  
“No.” He kissed the top of her head and she sighed. “Of course not.”

 

* * *

 

  
“You’re leaving.”  
  
Sherlock was there when John got back from work the next day. He might have stumbled over his own feet when he rounded the corner and found the boy standing in front of his house.  
  
“Why do you think that?” John asked, fumbling with his keys as he tried to unlock the front door.  
  
“You’ve got the same smile on your face from London,” he said, and he sounded really pissed off about it. “You’re never that happy here. Also the car’s washed and the tires are fully inflated. You’re going somewhere.”  
  
“Not permanently,” John added stepping back to let Sherlock in and shutting the door behind him. “A weekend. Three days in Paris. You won't even notice I'm gone.”  
  
That didn’t stop Sherlock from looking angry and hurt.  
  
“You’re not jealous, are you?” John asked him, and Sherlock looked very pointedly away.  
  
They stood together by the front door in silence, with John awkwardly fiddling with his keys and Sherlock’s knuckles turning white around the strap of his bag.  
  
“Look, about yesterday-” John started.  
  
“If you’re going to tell me you’ve come back to your senses and want nothing to do with me, spare me,” Sherlock snapped, shoving his hands angrily into his trouser pockets.  
  
“Then what’re you doing here?”  
  
Sherlock’s eyes snapped to his, and he seemed to realize something, because he huffed and tried to catch the door handle to see himself out.  
  
“Wait, no, that’s not what I meant,” John protested, catching his wrist. “Sherlock, no, I didn’t mean get out, I meant...you came here to tell me something? You left yesterday-”  
  
“And today I decided I really don’t care if this is dangerous and idiotic and I’m impossibly jealous of your girlfriend. You’re...someone that I need. I’m not going to waste the only chance I have.” He kept his eyes on their hands and didn’t look up until John lifted his head with two fingers under his chin.  
  
It wasn’t that he’d forgotten about yesterday when he’d decided on the holiday with Mary. He didn’t know if she’d decided not to look into it or if she hadn’t noticed, nothing out of the ordinary happened later that day ( she’d joked about how it was amazing he hadn’t broken the dishwasher with all the plates they’d left in the sink all night and insisted she make dinner that night with the recipe Wil had given her). But he’d woken up on Thursday with the memory of Sherlock’s hands across his shoulders and found himself wishing they hadn’t stopped.  
  
He wasn’t surprised then, to find himself pressed against the wall a second later with the radiator pressed against the backs of his knees and Sherlock’s hands on either side of his face. Sherlock’s mouth collided with his so forcefully that his teeth cut his lip, but he cared more about the taste warm taste of Sherlock’s breath than the blood, and short, desperate gasps and curled fingers in hair. By the time Sherlock pulled John’s lips between his and sucked painfully slowly, the man’s fingers were splayed across the small of Sherlock’s back. It was less of a kiss and more an angry attack of lips and teeth and tongue, and  John could feel Sherlock’s fingers leaving a trail of bruises from the back of his head and down over his shoulders. Sherlock pressed in, his thigh pushing in between John’s legs as he tilted his head and flicked his tongue past the man’s parted lips. John ‘s lungs were burning but he only pulled the boy in closer, even as he ran out of air and resorted to panting hard against the other’s lips.  
  
“Fuck.”  
  
Sherlock’s laugh was breathless and weak, but before long John had his head pressed against the boy’s shoulder and was laughing with him.  
  
“I don’t want to leave anymore,” John whispered, and Sherlock’s good humour soon faded.  
  
“I was going to say I shouldn’t have come,” Sherlock mumbled. The pads of his fingers smoothed down the curls at the nape of John’s neck.  
  
“But?”  
  
“I don’t regret it,” he said, and John had to say he agreed. But he couldn't cancel the trip either.  
  
They stayed pressed together for another minute, Sherlock’s arms curved around John’s neck and the man’s hands still tucked under the boy’s shirt on his back. He could feel Sherlock’s breathing if he moved slightly, the rise and fall of his chest and the shift of muscles under thin skin; the outline of his ribs, too, further upward. Sherlock nuzzled his cheek against John’s head and his arms tightened around the boy’s tiny waist. Sherlock was so thin he almost felt like glass.  
  
Sherlock stepped back eventually, drawing his palms across John’s cheeks as he let go. “Have fun in Paris.” John grimaced and the boy smirked.  
  
“Yeah,” John sighed, “I’ll try.”


	21. XI

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After a hiatus that was way longer than I expected, I'm finally working on this again. Sorry for the long wait.

Mary’s excitement was infectious. She came home from work early, singing, found John lounging across the sofa looking up places to visit that they hadn’t already.. She grinned and turned on the CD player they never used, pushed his laptop aside and pulled him off the sofa to dance with her.

Even though he was looking at Mary, dancing with her, holding her, laughing as she twirled him around the living room, he couldn’t help imagining what Sherlock’s reaction to all of this would be (disgust and a hilarious expression of disdain; he’d complain the whole time and roll his eyes). Mary caught him smiling.

“What?” She was breathless with excitement, eyes bright and cheeks flushed.

But she wasn’t Sherlock.

“Nothing,” he said, kissing her cheek and wrapping his arms around her waist, leaning his head against her shoulder so she couldn’t see his face. “Just remembering the last time we danced like this.”

“Mmm. Harry’s wedding.”

God, he’d forgotten. Last time he’d called his sister she’d sounded strained, and that was at least a week ago. “It’s nothing,” she’d say when he asked. And when he’d insisted, she’d snapped back with “I’m not telling you anything until you’re honest with me.” And who _was_ he being honest with anymore? Absolutely fucking no one, that was who.

“I just want you to relax,” Mary whispered. They were swaying out of time to the music, and her lips were close enough to brush against his ear. “To forget whatever it is that’s been bothering you.”

She felt thinner in his arms than he remembered. He didn’t try to say anything to that, and she didn’t expect an answer.

* * *

 

France was fine. France was good, in fact, and it would’ve been brilliant if everything had gone to plan.

It didn’t.

It wasn’t getting there that was the problem. Mary had apparently been planning this for a lot longer than it seemed (“I was hoping you’d say Paris, because I already had tickets and a hotel booked anyway” she conveniently  mentioned later): the problems started hours later when John had time to think- after arriving at the hotel and finding their room (and then kissing as soon as the door closed behind them and migrating to the bed soon after).

There had been something missing since the last time they’d been together, and John felt it again when Mary’s hands found their way to the front of his shirt; it was a tug in his stomach, a feeling that pulled his mouth away from hers and stopped her fingers.

They blinked at each other, waiting for one of them to explain what had just happened- because there was no reason for John to pull back: they loved each other, this was their break together and Mary was looking at him like she didn’t understand what was going on -

“Lunch!” Mary smiled- bright and strained- leaving a kiss on his parted lips before she slid off the bed and back into her shoes. “We’re surrounded by restaurants and I’m _starving_.”

She disappeared into the bathroom and John turned onto his back, stared at the ceiling and hoped he wouldn’t be the reason she became the person he had met all those years ago. She’d always been so vibrant, and she still was when she wasn’t around John. But she was bordering on the same broken cheerfulness that had made him promise to never hurt her again.

But he couldn’t keep this up.


	22. Vérité

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been long overdue, but I'm finally ready to post the rest of this. 
> 
> But there are two options: 
> 
> 1) Wait every week for a new chapter until the end
> 
> 2) Have all the chapters posted today/tomorrow, because I've already written the end
> 
> I think I'm leaning towards 2 because there are a good few chapters left, but if y'all don't want to wait, I can do that. 
> 
> I'm just happy I finally got this done and stuck with it. 
> 
> And I'm glad you guys stuck with it too.

John supposed he could have saved the rest of their holiday from being one long, uncomfortable guilt-trip,  if he hadn’t been woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call.

He and Mary had spent the day together after lunch, strolling through the streets arm in arm, window shopping, pausing briefly to admire street artists, exchanging words that he forgot as soon as they were said. Mary tried so hard to keep them afloat, and he was starting to suspect that she knew it wasn’t working. She knew. She had to. But they had to keep pretending for a while, even if it hurt her more to keep it up.

But there was the phonecall the next day, so early in the morning that the sun hadn’t risen yet. John groaned and debated letting the it ring out, but the nagging worry that something was horribly wrong forced him to roll over and pick it up. Hopefully it’d be quick. The more time he spent awake the worse he felt.

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end was breathless, mindlessly ecstatic, playful, and suddenly John was very awake.

“John.”

Mary stirred awake. She asked him blearily what was going on, but he was already slipping out of her arms, throwing off the tangled sheets and trying to move out of earshot before she noticed how pale his face had become, before she started asking questions he couldn’t answer.

“It’s six in the morning.” He listened, heard heavy breathing and a car driving by in the background. “Where are you?”

“ _John_ ,” Sherlock ignored him, kept talking and stumbling over the words as if he couldn’t speak them fast enough. “John, London’s gorgeous at night, have you seen it like this? You can’t even see the stars out here because the lights are so bright. You can’t see a _thing_.”

John could feel his heart hammering in his chest as he fumbled with the latch on the screen door to the balcony. Mary was calling his name. “Are you _drunk_?”

“ _Wasted_ ,” he giggled, carelessly blissful in a way that made John feel sick. “Absolutely.”

John slid the door closed behind him and scrubbed his face wearily. Of course, _of course_ this had to happen when he was _miles_ away, at exactly the right distance to be completely useless.  “Where are you?”

Sherlock didn’t answer straight away, as if he was having trouble stringing words together or understanding the question, which wasn’t like him at all. “London,” he said slowly. “Didn’t I just say-?”

John grit his teeth. “No, _where_ in London?”

Mary was calling his name again. He could hear her distantly through the glass but his back was turned to her so he pretended he couldn’t hear her.

“I-” Sherlock seemed confused suddenly, disorientated by such a simple question. John could hear him turning on the spot, hear cars further away than they had been a minute ago. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

There was a tap on the glass door.

“Go back to the road,” John ordered, pinching the bridge of his nose and leaning against the balcony rail. “Find a sign and tell me where you are.” He could remember being scared for someone else before, but not like this. He wasn’t usually this helpless- then again, he hadn’t had to deal with a teenager  in a major city, completely wasted and hopelessly lost. He wondered how parents ever managed. It wasn’t worth having a kid if this is how they made you worry. It wasn’t worth loving anyone either in that case.

Just as Sherlock found a sign and said so- stumbling over the name of a street that he thought was vaguely familiar- Mary caught up with him. Having her there made him feel worse, but there was no way to tell her to leave, although he knew by now that his time pretending had already run out. He would have liked it not to be like this, but then everything was entirely his fault.

“Is there anyone you can call in the area?” John asked, determinedly ignoring the curious look on Mary’s face. “Someone who can pick you up?” She put a hand on his shoulder, and his skin burned under his shirt.

He could practically hear Sherlock’s scowl. “I’m not calling my brother.”

John sighed exasperatedly. “You’re not wandering around in the city overnight, you idiot, you’re going to get yourself killed, or...just call your brother.”

“He wouldn’t-”

“Sherlock Holmes, call your bloody brother right now or so help me I will come back right now and kill you myself, do you understand? Call him and tell me you’ve done it straight after!” A light flickered on in the room next to theirs and John really didn’t care if people started complaining about the shouting. Whatever the hell kind of trouble Sherlock had gotten himself into, John would get him out of it.

Sherlock finally gave in after a bit of grumbling, promised to call Mycroft, and hung up.

“Who was that?”

His  anxiety had just mellowed out into a low hum that still made him feel nauseous and it spiked again when Mary asked. He swallowed.

“There’s...something I have to tell you,” he said, putting a hand on her back and directing her back towards the bed. “Something  important.” She didn’t seem surprised, but her face fell a little and he almost stopped himself from saying anything else. Wouldn’t it be better if he waited, at least until they were home and he had time to try and make it easier for her?

“I’ve been lying to you,” he blurted before he could change his mind and take it back and make things worse than they already were. He was going to get a stomach ulcer or have a heart attack from all the stress and he’d deserve it. “I haven’t told you a lot of things.”

She looked down at her hands in her lap and nodded. “I know.”

Something squirmed in his stomach. He would rather have taken a knife to the gut than do this to her. He was a complete coward and everything he’d dreamt of being- a doctor, a soldier; he wasn’t good enough to do any of it. His mother had died at just the right time, it seemed. “Remember when you...you asked if I was seeing someone else?”

She sighed, dropped her head into her hands. “Not you too,” she whispered.

“Mary-”

“Who is she?”

He licked his lips nervously. His hand had automatically hovered over her shoulder and he took it back now. It would do more harm than good and he knew what her reaction was going to be. “He.”

She blinked. “You’re _gay_.”

“No.” It felt like he’d eaten a bag of frogs and now all of them were desperately trying to rip their way through his stomach at once. “I...no. It’s not like that. It’s...” He hesitated, but it wasn’t like there was anything he could say to make things any better. There was no good news to counter this with. “That’s not all of it.”

She laughed, once and hard, ran her hands through her hair. This wasn’t like her and he knew that, he knew how much pain she was in and why she’d become so callous, but it didn’t hurt any less. “Of course it isn’t.”

“He’s seventeen.”

He’d never imagined the horror on her face. He’d anticipated fury, tears, disgust, but nothing so absolute and miserable.

She blinked,  nodded first, covered her mouth and turned away from him, and for a moment it seemed like she would accept it, leave him and act like he had never even existed in the first place. But as soon as she opened her mouth,  she was sobbing, backing away from him, more distraught than he had ever seen her.

He couldn’t reach out to her. For once he couldn’t be the one to comfort her because she was alone again, a failure who couldn’t keep a marriage or two other relationships going, a woman so incompetent that the one man she’d finally begun to trust had betrayed her for someone twenty years her junior, someone not even the same gender. So he waited for it- the accusation, the ‘you’re disgusting’ and the peadophilia claims, the fury.

She leaned forwards against his shoulder and cried, and John rubbed her back as her whole body shook with her agony and he stayed with her for the last time until his phone rang again. He left her curled up on the bed and he returned to the balcony.

“He’s coming to get me,” Sherlock grumbled. John would have smiled if he hadn’t feel like he’d cut off an entire side of his body. “I hope you’re happy.” His words were a little less slurred at least, and there was a different kind of noise behind him.

“I just glad you’re safe,” he said. He didn’t have the energy to sound less miserable. “Are you inside?”

“Coffee shop,” Sherlock explained. So that was why he sounded a little less drunk, and more like he was starting to regret how much he’d drunk. John knew how that felt. “I think they’ll want me to leave soon. They keep looking at me like I’m going to start trouble.” He tried for a feeble chuckle but stopped and hissed instead.

There was a pause and then “What’ve you done?”

“Why do you assume-”

“You didn’t immediately yell for buying coffee first instead of calling you.” His words were slow. He took a sip of coffee and continued. “You sound terrible. What did you do?”

He opened his mouth but he couldn’t say it, not when if he turned around he’d be faced with Mary’s misery. He could feel it pressing invisibly on his back and no amount of cool French air was helping. Closer to dawn, the sky was growing lighter.

“I told her,” he said eventually. “About us.”

There was a beat of silence and then, “Oh.”

“Yeah. When’s Mycroft going to pick you up?”

Sherlock hesitated as if he was going to insist that John shouldn’t change the subject, but he didn’t. “Soon...a few more minutes maybe. He wasn’t far.”

“That’s good.”

There was that hesitation again, and then, “Why did you tell her?”

John leaned against the railing, one hand dangling over the edge. “I couldn’t keep lying to her, Sherlock,” he pointed out.

“I know that, I mean...mm. What does it mean? Who’re you...choosing?”

He hadn’t even gotten a chance to think about that yet. The first answer that came to mind was a panicked “I don’t know” but his gut pulled towards Sherlock. All logic pointed him to Mary and while he knew which choice was stronger- the one that was met with a resounding “yes” from somewhere deep and selfish- it still wasn’t any easier. He loved Mary and wanted to be with her and she was his right decision; but there was Sherlock, pulling towards adventure that John had considered years ago, something passionate, a little desperate and he wanted it. He’d tried steady-relationship-with-a-side-of-children, and almost made it as far as marriage. His mother would have been proud of him, and Harry would try her best to sober up for the wedding. He’d seen it clearly before, living the rest of his life with Mary, a life of mediocre but safe choices until the end.

But if Sherlock was what he wanted, maybe he’d take the shame.

“I don’t know yet,” he said wearily. “We’ll talk, all right? I just...not right now. I can’t do this now.” He paused. “I need to see you.”

“It’s been...two days,” Sherlock pointed out, and John sighed.

“I’m aware. Just try not to get into any more trouble before I get back, all right? Please.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.”


	23. Wander

Mary left.

By the time he’d slipped from the balcony back into the room, she was already coming out of the shower, getting dressed, packing her things. She didn’t speak to him, didn’t look at him, hardly breathed: her face stony, frozen in anger but still hurt.

She let the door shut quietly behind her and left John alone in the quiet room, emptier now without her things mingled with his, and a note on the dresser:

We’ll talk. For the time being, however, do not attempt to contact me. I’ll decide when I’m in the right mind to even care to listen.

John spent the rest of the day getting early return tickets and a hotel room back home, eating breakfast alone and then getting on the train back to London. He wished he could sleep through all of it and pretend that he’d never said anything, never so much as met Sherlock in the first place, but there was no time to sleep. He deserved to suffer through it anyway, and feeling sorry for himself only proved how much of a terrible human being he was. For all he wanted, it was better if he didn’t get any of it.

Saturday rolled painfully into Sunday, and John woke up in a half empty double bed for the first time in months. What he’d done was beginning to sink in and full consciousness brought the full brunt of the pain with it. Maybe he could fix things with Mary, but not the way either of them wanted, and no matter what he did it seemed like there would always be this nagging doubt in the back of his head constantly wondering at what could have been. He’d been so naive to think that after he left home, after he left Mum on her own,  his life would just fall into place and he hadn’t had enough to drink last night...

There was a knock at the door and John froze. It was still morning- ten o’clock and gray- and he hadn’t been expecting anyone. The room wasn’t getting cleaned today and he wasn’t going to breakfast. He ignored it.

The knock came again.

He figured he really had nothing else to lose, heaved himself out of bed (he’d fallen asleep unknowingly in a pair of old tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt after he’d forced himself to take a shower that hadn’t really helped), shuffled to the door and opened it.

“You really went all out on the hotel room, didn’t you?” Sherlock said sarcastically, inviting himself in as John stared.

“How did you find me?”

He shrugged, kicked off his shoes by the door. “I have my ways.”

It had only been a few days. It was odd then, that seeing him now made something ache in John’s chest. He’d been planning on restraining himself, but as soon as their fingers brushed against each other he promptly forgot about that.

It was gradual; it hurt to be so close while still not quite touching, but Sherlock took his time, stepping in and tilting his head, his hands hovering over the man’s waist as his lips brushed against John’s.

“I missed you,” he whispered.

John would have replied but the words were lost in the kiss, Sherlock’s trembling lips, the heat of his mouth as he swept his tongue over John’s bottom lip, the space between them disappearing as they both pressed in. John curled his fingers at the nape of Sherlock’s neck and panted against his mouth as if they hadn’t kissed in months instead of days.

He couldn’t give this up. He couldn’t give up being close and wanting to be closer still, the way he wanted-  needed- to make sure Sherlock knew how much he felt, this feeling that was so overwhelming he could hardly stand as Sherlock’s hand pressed flat at the base of his back under his shirt.

They moved towards the bed, John’s knees hitting the mattress first. They broke apart clumsily, returned to each other with the same initial desperation across the unmade sheets, feet tangled together, the stillness of the room replaced with the sound of wet kisses.

“Okay,” John gasped after they broke apart. “Before this.. Why were you drunk in London last night?”

He opened his eyes and was momentarily distracted by the way Sherlock looked; hair disheveled from the hands that had run through it, lips a soft, slightly swollen red, pupils flared and cheeks flushed as John hovered over him. For a second he forgot about everything that worried him and remembered the under him was another person to worry over, yet someone he’d gladly (stupidly) given up a stable future for. The uncomfortable itch that reminded him something was missing was ever there with Sherlock, although he wondered how long that would last, how quickly Sherlock would get bored of him and drift off to better things, people his age who could give him what he wanted for the rest of his life.

Sherlock touched his face and John blinked out of his thoughts again. He drew a line with his fingertips, starting at John’s ear and curving down along his jaw to his chin, drawing a line across his lips with a thumb that tasted salty on John’s parted lips.

“I want you to tell me what happened,” John insisted softly, but the words were partially lost in another kiss. He tried to pull back but Sherlock was persistent, keeping a hand on the back of John’s neck, softly biting his lip, anything to stop him from talking.

“Sherlock-”

“No.” He tugged at John’s shirt, pulling him down again, pressing his lips more forcefully against the other man’s. “No.”

“I can’t just ignore-”

Sherlock held his face in both hands and glared. “You don’t want to hear it.”

If John was used to anything it was Sherlock’s scowls. No matter how cutting they got, John could match them now. “When have I ever not wanted to hear it?”

He waited for an answer but none came. He could see Sherlock searching frantically for one in his head, but the most he managed were a few half-starts before he admitted defeat and John rolled onto his side while Sherlock stayed on his back, frowning up at the ceiling.

“It was stupid,” he began, and John had to agree although he didn’t say so, “ I...got together with some old friends. They were wary at first. The way they saw it, I’d left them because I thought I was too good for them. They ignored me at first, and it got to the point where...I thought about you.” He turned to John but his eyes slid off the man’s face and fixed on the headboard behind him. “I thought about how disappointed you’d be. But then there was a drink in my hand and I couldn’t refuse it. I hung around for a while, had a beer and decided I had to escape.”

“So you got on a train to London?” It had to be more than beer- he’d been out of his mind, and one beer didn’t do that to someone like Sherlock, at least John hoped not. Unless there’d been something else with the alcohol.

“I took a few more drinks for the road because, you know, if I fell in the street and choked on my own vomit I knew I wouldn’t care. I didn’t want to come back if it was to...to you and Mary and hearing that you were getting married and moving on.” His hand blindly sought John’s and he let Sherlock take it. “You wouldn’t have time for me if you were busy starting a family. You’d have to let go of me and then who...?”

He shook his head, tried to meet John’s eyes but couldn’t. He went on, explaining how he’d thought about getting rid of the drinks and the schoolbag he’d emptied for them, how he’d gotten on the train instead and found a group of people who were too high to remember him, stuck around until the cans ran dry and blindly walked away after taking a hit of something that made him feel disorientated but happy in a detached sort of way. He found himself walking around London, past the city nightlife and the music spilling out of doors with a bassline so heavy it made the teeth in his head rattle. He talked to a girl idling  outside with piercings in practically every inch of her face, hair dyed black and pink and a smile that he supposed was fairly pretty (although he couldn’t be sure of most of his memories now). He couldn’t remember their conversation but he remembered her trying to kiss him, leaning in and gently pushing his impassive mouth open with her lips, waiting for a response and getting nothing. She’d looked at him strangely, perhaps asked what was wrong. He could remember her slipping back into the club, remember the space she left behind, her smell (sweet; something alcoholic and sweet), the cold air and the streetlights straight ahead, he remembered a  group walking by laughing too loudly to be sober, the bouncer watching him suspiciously by the door of the club.

At some point the drugs finally truly set into his system, and he recalled being the happiest he’d ever felt. As he’d strolled away from the club, he’d called John, wandered further and further away from the street but miraculously been left alone. He’d been lucky this time, to be left with a lingering headache that he tried to hide with kisses but which showed itself when John was no longer touching him.

“I know I should regret it,” he added, almost too quietly for John to hear, “but it helped me forget everything that I was angry about. It helped me forget you and Mary, myself...” He scrubbed his face with his hands, ruined his hair. “It felt good for a while. I wanted to do it again even though I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

Of course it was going to happen again while John was around, maybe when hell froze over or Sherlock decided the name of the prime minister was of any importance to him. “What did Mycroft say?”

Sherlock shot him a disgusted look at the mention of his brother and John struggled with a smile. “He knew better than to ask questions I wouldn’t answer.”

John nodded, aware that pushing it any further would only make them both miserable. There’d be time for that later, when they weren’t worried about each other dying from their own stupidity and recklessness.

Sherlock stayed in the room. There was a small, ancient TV they didn’t turn on, and at some point John dozed off. He dreamt about Mary’s sobbing, telling Harry everything. In the dream she backed away from him too, kicked him out of her house and life and pretended she didn’t have a brother at all.

There weren’t any parents to tell any more, but he knew perfectly well what their reaction would have been-they would have both disowned him;  his father instantly and his mother with some reluctance, but he’d be cut off from his family for sure. He couldn’t give them that kind of news and expect them to understand it. There weren’t any stories of a case like this ending with anything other than tears, John knew that perfectly well, and he woke up feeling sick and thirsty and disorientated by the noise in the room. The TV had been turned on, left on the news to entertain itself while Sherlock toyed with his phone, eating without John making him do it for once.

“I went out for food a while ago,” he said without looking away from his phone. “You’ve been asleep for a few hours.”

John wanted to apologise for wasting the time they had together like this, but he felt there was something he had to do before he could settle. He was restless, too hot in the shirt that clung to him with cold sweat until he swung his legs off the bed, picked up his phone and called Harry. Sherlock sat behind him, but John could feel the curious look through his back.

She picked up after a few rings. She wasn’t surprised to hear from him.

“Mary called a while ago,” she explained, and something in John’s empty stomach tightened. “You’ll be happy to know that she ended up crying, even though she hated herself for it.”

He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose and hunched over his knees. “Harry-”

“She didn’t make a whole lot of sense when I tried to ask her about it. Mentioned something about a younger person in between trying to convince me that she was a failure?”

“I didn’t want-”

“Oh, I wish I’d pried the truth out of you sooner but I suppose I thought the last scraps of honour you had would make sure I wouldn’t have to.”

“I already know I’m not worth any of your time, Harry,” he said finally, weakly. “I haven’t done anything good for you since I left home.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“And I know it  started earlier than Mary,” he continued.

It was Harry’s turn to sigh, although it was sharp and exasperated. “I swear to god, if you’re still hung up over mum  I’m going to come over there just to knock you out.” she snapped, “ I know this has to be one of the most idiotic things you’ve ever done, but I’m sick of you beating yourself up over-”

“I didn’t have to leave her!” he shouted, and he imagined her fury on the other side of the phone. “She wasn’t fine on her own, and it all started then, didn’t it? I don’t have a single honest bone in my body but I pretended that I did and I knew I should’ve looked after her  but I was so _desperate_ to join the army that I-”

“She would never have blamed you! She knew how much you wanted it-”

“Well she can’t tell me that now that she’s dead, can she!”

It was as if the world had stopped moving for a second, as if every sound had suddenly been sucked out of the room. He could hear Sherlock pause in the middle of eating, the hum off the television, the creak of a floorboards in the room above, but it was mostly dense, horrified silence; the kind that pressed in hard, made his ears ring, made his heart sink in his chest and die somewhere on the floor.

“You still should’ve gone,” Harry tried, although he was already shaking his head even though she couldn’t see him. “Even after she died she wouldn’t have wanted you to try settling into something you didn’t want. You didn’t have to stay to bloody protect me.”

“I didn’t deserve it after that. I didn’t. I didn’t deserve Mary and I don’t deserve Sherlock, you know that.”

“Sherlock?” There was another pause, a heartbeat of stunned silence and then, “You mean the kid you counselled a few months ago?”

John didn’t say anything. He felt sick. He was sweating again and Harry’s voice sounded distant.

“You left your girlfriend for an underage kid?”

“Technically he’s not underage,” John tried, but he knew he wasn’t going to get listened to. Somehow it was harder to explain to his sister than anyone else and he wanted to hang up the phone, throw it away and never look at it again, find a hole somewhere to live in and disappear for the rest of his life.

“I’m coming to see you, all right? Tomorrow, okay, so don’t try and run off again just to avoid talking about it. We’ll meet somewhere and...John?”

He didn’t answer.

“ _John_.”

He was vaguely aware of a hand prying the phone from his fingers, heat and the dip of the mattress behind him; a voice saying that he’d be there and then the beep of the dropped call. Hands on his shoulders, a mouth by his ear.

Sherlock didn’t try to say anything. There wasn’t a single word John wanted to hear.


	24. Turn Over

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter tomorrow to celebrate the fact that I have finished high school  
> (Isn't that amazing)  
> (I graduate before series 3 of Sherlock even airs)  
> (That's how long this show takes to get done, hot damn)

John met with Harry a few days later. He’d moved back into the house, too big and empty now without the woman who had told him she couldn’t stand to live surrounded by memories of him. By the time he got to the cafe he’d agreed to meet Harry in, it had been at least four days since he’d had a good night’s sleep. The lines under his eyes were more obvious the after every morning of lost sleep, but he reminded himself again and again as he forced himself to look his reflection in the eye: he deserved this.

“She doesn’t hate you, you know,” Harry said gently, toying with the spoon still sitting in her mug of hot chocolate. “When she calls, she says she can’t.”

John almost told his sister that he didn’t want to talk about Mary, but then he’d be lying. He knew that he needed to talk and that he’d feel better if he did, but it had been a while since he’d felt what his clients did: the reluctance and shame that kept them quiet in those first sessions was something he’d never truly understood because he hadn’t lived it.

“And I get it,” Harry continued. “After I found out Clara-” She stopped, cleared her throat, took the spoon out of her mug and laid it gently on the saucer beside it. “I left her but I still don’t hate her.” She sighed. “I’m still in love with her, even though I know I shouldn’t be. And Mary will forgive you one day.”

John didn’t say anything. He hardly felt awake anymore. A therapist wasn’t supposed to fall apart like this. He’d always been destined to fail, he knew that now. He was never meant to help anyone- look at the trouble it had gotten him into in the beginning, the minute he’d told his family he wanted to enroll in the military and become a doctor.

“You’re not a bad man, John,” Harry insisted, and he almost left then. He wanted the pity but he also abhorred it; he wanted to suffer and he simultaneously wanted to be forgiven. He wanted to sleep and wake up in another decade of human history.

Harry took a sip of hot chocolate as John continued to let his tea go cold. “You could’ve told me about Sherlock.”

He grimaced. He hadn’t spoken to Sherlock since that day at the hotel. For all John knew, he had finally decided to leave the old man alone. He could hardly expect the kid to stick around, especially through all of this.

“I’m your sister. Goodness knows I haven’t been a very good one but I’m still here. I told you to talk to me.”

“And what would you have said?”

“I don’t know.” She waved a dismissive hand. “It wouldn’t have surprised me. You mentioned him a lot more than you thought you did, at least before you stopped talking altogether.”

Had he really been so obvious? Now that he thought about it, he probably had. He definitely had. He’d been just  short of a flashing sign and a few fireworks proclaiming his feelings for the universe to see.

“Remember Uncle Jareth?” Harry began, and John scrubbed his face with his hand.

“Oh, God.” Not this.

“No listen. You remember when he said he’d gotten engaged to a girl he used to teach, right? At least twenty years younger than him, and mum pretended he didn’t exist until she died.”

“Are you going to tell me that they’re perfectly happy together? That their lives are wonderful and perfect even though mum’s side of the family hates them and dad’s couldn’t care less?” Harry started to say something but John didn’t want to hear it. “Dad died hating me and I knew mum needed me but I pretended that she’d be fine until I got through military, but of course I let her down too. The least I could do is not disgrace them both.”

Harry was keeping her temper a lot better than John expected. It was usually the other way around, with Harry getting angrier the more they spoke and John becoming more weary the longer he tried to console her. He didn’t like it like this.

“This isn’t about them. I’m starting to think ignoring them was the best thing I did, because at least I didn’t turn into you,” she snapped.

The air turned cold suddenly, stiff and more hostile than before.

“You know what I mean,” she said weakly. She rubbed her eyebrow with her forefinger, squeezed her eyes shut. “Just be aware that if everyone else hates you for it, I’m not going to stop you from seeing someone you care about. You figure it out. And if you need someone whine at, it’s about time I returned the favour. Right?”

He considered not answering her at all, but he nodded his agreement at the table. It was the first time, he realised later, that he had felt as if he had an older sister.


	25. White

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's 12:18 AM. It's technically Wednesday. 
> 
> I think that I'll eventually write an epilogue, but for now, this is it. It is a completed work, I'm done, I did it, I didn't abandon it. 
> 
> So. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, for leaving kudos, for putting up with long waits and some irregular updates. The comments honestly always made my day so much better. 
> 
> Feel free to come and yell at me in my ask box (cliffrose-acetone.tumblr.com). And thanks again.

“Amsterdam.”

Of course. It wasn’t so surprising a second later; another thirty and his initial shock had died down to resignation. He’d been expecting this since the beginning, ever since he’d heard more of what Sherlock’s brother was doing in London.

John nursed a lukewarm mug of tea between sweaty palms, stared vacantly at the coffee table. “I didn’t know he studied Dutch.”

“He doesn’t.” Mycroft had a different sort of voice compared to his brother; Sherlock’s words were primarily careful but Mycroft was the refined gentleman. He could see why Sherlock admired and hated him. Even this young, Mycroft was an intimidating sort of man. Maybe it was the umbrella, John speculated, black with a polished redwood handle; expensive yet subtly intimidating. It wasn’t raining.

Mycroft sighed, forcing John to return to the situation he’d been subconsciously dreading for months. It was early January now. Things had shifted, changed in ways that Sherlock had been been less than happy about, but there was nothing he could do about it now. His parents wanted him to go to uni early, and Mycroft suggested his brother’s studies continue outside of the country.

“You must understand, John,” Mycroft continued, setting his untouched tea on the table and folding his hands carefully on his lap, “that Sherlock is young and cannot possibly be expected to stay.” He paused. “Perhaps when he returns it will be with another partner.”

He’d never wanted to entertain the possibility, but Mycroft was right. There would be other Victorias in Amsterdam, in other countries and cities and entire continents that Sherlock would discover; John had his life here in a quiet English town with a steady, normal job. He would grow old before Sherlock ever started to, and why would a man with so much potential wait for a fading dust cloud who would only tie him down?

“How long did you know?” John asked quietly. His voice was hoarse, rough after staying silent while Mycroft had spoken.

“Sherlock managed to hide far more than I expected,” he said. “But I suspected. When I found him in London, he confirmed it.”

“And your parents-”

“Have no idea. Or if they do, they’d rather pretend it isn’t happening.” Mycroft smiled. It never reached his eyes and it hurt John’s eyes to see it. “Everyone’s happy.”

Sherlock would be gone for four years at least, more if he decided to stay before (if) he returned to England. For Sherlock’s own good and John’s, judging my the look Mycroft threw him) there would be no correspondence between them.

But he was allowed to say goodbye.

Sherlock spent the first hour or so of his last day fuming on the sofa while John moved around the house, picking up things he’d left behind; toothbrushes from when he’d slept over, discarded, mismatched socks; underwear that had migrated to Mary’s old drawers over the past few weeks; shirts and books and pens that remained after he had gone.

As John paused to pick up something from the floor (one of the compact magnifying glasses that Sherlock had taken to carrying with him), the man himself appeared in the doorway.

“You think I’m going to forget you.”

He’d been like this for the past few days; gloomy, he moved like a shadow, hardly talking, his voice accusatory and angry when he did.

“You should,” John reminded him, straightening the bed covers (he thought of it as their bed sometimes. One always felt the other’s presence missing when they shared it).

John was aware of him crossing the room, but he didn’t look up. “I can’t,” Sherlock insisted as he always did. His voice cracked a little. “You can’t start treating me like I’m not old enough to understand. Even when you tried to stop this- sometimes I don’t think you even tried at all- you didn’t treat me like a child. At least you didn’t want to.” He tilted his head, tried to catch John’s eyes. “I’m not a child anymore, John.”

Sherlock’s hands were on his forearms then, his lips brushing against the corner of John’ mouth. He was already angling his head towards Sherlocks, parting his lips automatically and accepting the softest of kisses, so brief it was almost as if he’d imagined it..

“I don’t want you to wait for me,” John tried, although his arms curled around Sherlock’s waist and pulled him in, “I want you to go out and live because staying with me isn’t living for you.” Sherlock sighed irritably against John’s lips. “Please.”

“I can’t promise anything,” he said stubbornly, and John smiled, just a little. He’d miss that. God, he’d miss it.

“John.”

Sherlock’s eyes were open: panicked, strained against the anguish he didn’t want to show, especially not now as his hands found the back of John’s head, his shoulder. “John, I don’t want this.”

There weren’t any lies left to tell that were worth it at this point. “I-” he was cut off by Sherlock’s lips, pressing in hard and desperate, before John could tell him he agreed.

There was a brief interlude which involved fumbling with buttons and messy kisses they remembered from the hotel room weeks ago; clothes fell to the floor and hands moved again, fingertips trailed over John’s throat, his chest, teased along the waistband of his trousers; hands were suddenly replaced with Sherlock’s leg hooked over his waist as he was turned onto his back, Sherlock on top with the mattress dipping on either side of John’s head; and in between the panting and wet movement of lips was Sherlock’s gasped “I love you.”

They both paused then, breathing too heavily for more words but still frozen by the last ones still suspended in the air between them. Because this was the first. It had been unspoken for so long but so obvious, that when John realised that it was the first time either of them had said it, he thought he must have somehow forgotten. One of them must have said it before.

So it couldn’t go on like this. Especially not their last day.

John’s  hands drew across Sherlock’s skin (always so pale, almost translucent in some places); the lightest of touches grazed the column of Sherlock’s neck, the flat palm reserved for his stomach, across his chest. But John hesitated at Sherlock’s waist.

_You know my boundaries_. It had been a while, but he could still remember the words clearly enough that his palm ran along the inside of Sherlock’s thigh and over his knee before warm, open-mouthed kisses left their mark across the skin John had covered, sucking, nipping (hard enough to have him clutch at John’s shoulders; not enough to leave a mark), making his way upwards again and meeting with Sherlock’s lips again. “And I love you.”


End file.
